Stealing the Moon
by WildJackelope
Summary: After their last trip in May, Ennis gets a nudge in the right direction...but he worries he's too late, as Fate's plans for him and Jack may be unchangeable. Alternate ending set in summer 1983.
1. Chapter 1

_A/N: Usually I don't like fics that alter the original story's ending—especially an ending as beautiful as in BBM—but here I am being a hypocrite :) What can I say, I'm a fangirl at heart. However, everything I write ends up kind of quirky, so this is my own version of Ennis & Jack's happy ending—an odd sort of what-if story with a teeny-tiny bit of fantasy mixed in. I hope y'all like it! Time permitting, it'll be a three-part story some day; this is part one._

_Also of note: I read the story right before seeing the movie (same day) so the two are intertwined in my brain. I pick and choose some aspects of each. However, I did read the story first, so some things—most notably character descriptions—are my own interpretations based on the limited details in the story rather than on the actors/script/etc of the movie. So this is more of a book sequel, but I'm not trying to imitate Proulx's writing style (I'm far, far too wordy...) and the dialect I use for the characters isn't exactly like the book but is based on how people spoke at a ranch from my childhood. Oh, and original characters (c) Annie Proulx, of course! Feedback welcome, please :)_

* * *

><p><em>Signal, WY, 1983<em>

The last Sunday morning in May, Ennis lay twisted into a ball like a cat on his sagging fold-out bed, so lost in dreams he didn't hear the car turn down the ranch's long gravel driveway. Half-dreaming, anyway, awake at dawn out of habit but tempered by last night's whiskey, trying to fall back asleep or at least disappear into a daydream, not caring much which. A bottle drooped in one hand and a cigarette in the other, both spent, but in his dreams it was five years ago and he gripped reins in his hands and above him no aluminum trailer roof but blue-gray clouds tumbling down from the mountains:

He ambled along on a strawberry roan he'd fancied taking out on the trails, Georgia Peach. Ahead, Jack steered a black stallion up the rocky slope, trotting too fast for the terrain—the horse's choice, not the rider's—and Ennis was laughing and making bets with himself on when and how many times Jack would get thrown. Ennis hadn't intended to bring that horse on their fishing trip but the mare he'd planned for Jack had thrown a shoe getting into the trailer that morning, so it came down to either the stallion or walking. The rancher Ennis worked for, Jed Miller, bought that horse and a couple others for some kind of good deal when the bank took another ranch in town. Two mares, a colt, and then this one: biggest quarter horse Ennis had ever seen, stubborn and unruly, not quite green anymore but rough string if he was feeling generous. Dice, Miller had named him, because it was a toss-up whether you'd stay on. Ennis thought he'd have made a better bronc than cow horse. He'd also have made a good joke on Jack, rodeo show-off, always asking Ennis to bring a challenging horse. Ennis stood smirking in the stalls a few days before, considering it until he realized the joke would've been on him when he'd have to drive all the way back to exchange Dice for a rideable horse. But horseshoeing was nothing to rush, and Jack wasn't one to turn down a chance for excitement, so there they were anyway.

Up in the mountains, they made it halfway to their planned campsite before the storm crashed down from between the peaks, wind thrashing the land and sky, interchanging rain and sunshine, finally thunder. They climbed up to a ridge overlooking a long valley, watched the clouds gather like a flock of black sheep. _Turn around or keep on going?_ they mused, but they didn't have time to ponder it. Lightning pulsed through half the sky, white hot blood in forked veins. Thunder roared right on its tail, not even enough time to count, echoes ricocheting off the crags. The horses spooked. Dice started bucking like he was meant for rodeo, damn near swapping ends, and Ennis snorted a hearty laugh as it took Jack a second to switch from "combine salesman of the year" back into rodeo mode. Another lightening flash and Georgia Peach followed suit, rearing up with more energy than Ennis knew she had, and on his quick trip from horseback to ground he figured it served him right for laughing at Jack and for betting against a friend in the first place.

The rain hit. Georgia took off galloping down the mountain. Propping himself up on sore elbows in the mud, Ennis watched her reins flicking the air behind her until she was gone around the bend. Then, grunting, he rolled over and watched Jack still holding on until that wild stallion finally settled. Never did throw him. Damn smug-looking rodeo cowboy. At least Miller would be pleased his crazy horse was finally broke. Ennis stood, spat out some dirt, begrudged Jack a smile; if he wasn't the better rider, Jack sure had a better way with the animals. Ennis glanced over his shoulder toward where Georgia had gone, then, smile spreading so vaguely only Jack could've noticed, held out his thumb like a hitchhiker.

Dice hopped a bit but didn't buck when Ennis hauled himself up onto the saddle behind Jack. They rode back that way, Jack at the reins and Ennis squeezed soundly against him, sometimes holding his waist, sometimes draping an arm over his shoulder and wrapping it around as if to contain the heartbeats. Rain forged streams from Jack's hair through the stubble on Ennis's cheek, down his neck, pooling in that valley between heart and spine where their two bodies pressed almost seamlessly, heat radiating through wet denim. Ennis leaned into it, nose burrowed in the sea of dark curls, flushed lips against sun-brown skin, faces separated by only a single layer of water. He drew a slow breath of storm and sweat, whiskey and grass, pines, mountains—always the mountains—and he held it as long as he could, wanting to hold it inside him forever, safe in some dusky, wordless place.

At the first stream crossing, they found Georgia waiting placidly on the bank. She strolled to meet them, snorting affectionately as if glad to see the rider she'd done her best to rid herself of an hour before. Ennis could've let go of Jack and hopped down to reclaim his horse. Her saddle was still in place, reins muddy but intact, fine to ride. He could've let go.

Neither he nor Jack spoke, heat and rain saying all that could ever be spoken, a whisper of need between two pressed bodies. In a fluid motion without a waver in Dice's stride, Jack steered toward the mare and leaned just slightly to grab her reins, handing them over his shoulder to Ennis as Dice plodded into the stream. Ennis took them, collected another long drawn breath and closed his eyes, fingers intertwined with Jack's around the reins; in his grip, water and mud and hot flushed skin, and inside and all around them the soaring mountains. He towed Georgia back that way, reins clenched in two hands tight across Jack's chest, their seam unbroken.

At camp that night, drying in front of a fire too hot for summer storms, Jack fumbled with a match and a drowned cigarette and beside him Ennis fumbled with the tight spigots the rain had coiled into Jack's hair.

"Don't bode well for later," Ennis said nonchalantly, wrapping a curl around his pinky.

Jack flicked the cigarette into the fire. "What's that?" he asked, matching Ennis's tone, leaning into him.

"The horses spookin at a little thunder. Who knows what they're goin a do when ya bring out that harmonica."

* * *

><p>Car tires grumbled through the gravel driveway. <em>Jack<em>... Ennis thought, engulfed in the dream, knowing it wasn't anywhere near their next fishing trip in November, knowing by heart the engine roar of Jack's Ford that was far deeper than the approaching car's, jerking upright nonetheless. The empty container of whiskey clattered on the floor, twisting circles like a game of spin the bottle. He kicked it as he hopped toward the trailer door, yanking on jeans, breath ragged, stumbling, big toe stuck in a hole in one pant leg, colliding with the door more than opening it. The outline of a car edged through the approaching dust cloud. By the sofa, the whiskey bottle drifted to a stop.

Ennis huffed a few curse words through tight lips, kicked at his jeans and tore the hole wider finally pulling them on. His next thought was that he was late and it must be Stoutamire coming to find him, but remembered as the whiskey cleared that before leaving for the mountains a few weeks ago he'd wrangled one more day off out of his boss, and then remembered why. Two seconds later he was stamping his boots on and running down the steps as he recognized Junior's station wagon, pausing mid-stride at the sight of someone in the passenger seat—_please not Alma, can't handle Alma this early_—then taking the last step even quicker when Francine's light blonde hair came into view. Before Junior had even parked the car, the wave of dust overtook the trailer, stinging Ennis's bare chest with its grit, creeping into his mouth through his smile, then blowing on its way as if straight through him.

He wondered why the girls had come to visit so early; they must've woken up to leave not long after going to sleep the night before. _Gettin old_, he thought, remembering their plans to drive up but not their reason. He hoped they hadn't concocted another scheme to drag him along to church, though for a couple hours with them he always threw on a clean shirt and went along with no hesitation and minimal curse words.

Francie ran to meet him; Junior shut the car door her sister had flung wide open. Ennis bent to scoop up his younger daughter, recalling the last time they had visited and how he had twirled her around in the air for what seemed like a whole blissful day, how her waist-long hair had spun out around her in shiny waves like a field of summer wheat. Today he couldn't lift her past his ankles, rationalized that she must've had an incredible growth spurt in the last two months because it couldn't be his aching and creaking body at fault or all the whiskey swimming around in it, couldn't be. He turned it into a joke, dramatized his effort and gave up with a laughing sigh, telling her she had grown up so much he didn't know if he could call her his little girl anymore. She'd joked about that endearment last time, being sixteen.

"Daddy," Francie giggled, "I'll always be your little girl, even when I'm as tall as you!"

He set her down, backed up a step so his eyes could focus on her: a few tiny, ribboned braids adorned her hair, sunrise glinted off her braces, and was that blush on her cheeks or just laughter? Junior walked over, smile stretched ear to ear across deep dimples. "You won't never be as tall as Daddy," she told her sister.

"It's 'ever,' not 'never,' and I might just yet," Francie replied, having taken to correcting others' grammar ever since Alma and Munroe had transferred her to some upscale high school the year before. Anyway, Ennis knew his older daughter was right about Francie's height, at least. Francie took after Alma, petite and freckled, delicate features set gracefully on a small frame. Junior, despite her namesake, didn't have much of Alma in her, and for that Ennis was secretly glad—might've been why she was his favorite, just by a little bit, though he'd never say it.

Francie turned back toward her father. "Daddy, you're not even ready to go!" Ennis concluded it had to be church, though he must've pondered it a second too long. His little girl frowned. "You forgot, didn't you."

"No! No, I didn't forget, just..." he chuckled, a terrible liar, "you're early—church don't usually start til later—"

"You did so forget, and maybe you wouldn't have if you didn't drink so much whiskey all the time," Francie said matter-of-factly, skipping past her father and up the trailer steps. _That_ she had gotten from Alma too, no doubt about it.

Ennis's face locked in a half-smirk, lips open, letting in dust. He looked over to Junior for help but what help was she, standing there laughing until her face was redder than the sunrise. "It ain't church today, Daddy, it's fishin," she finally said, pointing toward the car where two fishing poles jutted out the rear window.

He remembered then. How could he have forgotten?—must've been that last trip with Jack, their argument, sickness as he drove away, a wasted week of drinking, then spare change gradually filling up an empty coffee tin. Everything jumbled, hadn't quite settled back into place. He told his girls right before he left on that trip that he'd take them fishing when he got back. Sighing, sound turning into a grunt partway through, he ran a calloused hand through his hair and followed Francie into the trailer. Should've known they wouldn't be dressed in jeans and boots for going to church. "I'll be ready in two shakes of a lamb's tail," he called with more energy than he felt. Sixteen and eighteen. Sometimes he talked to them like they were still little girls. With his boot toe he scooted the whiskey bottle under the bed.

The shirt hanging on the bathroom door knob looked clean. He threw it on over his head, sniffed it as it stretched over his nose: no cow shit or itchy scent of straw, clean enough. Catching the reflection of his five-day-old stubble, he decided the fish could wait a couple minutes for him to make himself presentable enough to be seen with his daughters. He soaped up his face, scraped at the graying hair with a razor he should've sharpened weeks ago. Halfway through, he leaned through the doorway and glanced into the main room where the girls waited. Francie was parked at the window, the waves in her hair soaking up the rising sun as she scrubbed the dusty glass with a handkerchief. Ennis smiled, nicked his chin. Her mother's mirror image, Francie was, for good and bad and all in between. Had she been born a few years later, he might've wondered if she was his daughter or Munroe's. Not like Junior, who was unmistakably Ennis's.

He glanced toward his older daughter who was on the floor, elbows leaning on the turned-over wooden potato crate that served double as a coffee table and a footstool. She tucked her hair behind her ear, smiling at something, Ennis could tell from her scrunched-up cheek even though she faced mostly away from him. She'd started out as much Ennis's twin as Francie was Alma's, but gradually something else bloomed up in her, tangible and not. The tawny hair of her childhood darkened, by twelve the color of weak coffee, by sixteen, strong. She still had Ennis's lanky structure, but every time he saw her, her angles had softened a little—a good sign, meant she was eating well. She smiled more, or maybe just smiled more deeply, radiance welling up in her dimples from some place within her. He never knew where her brown eyes came from, certainly not from his gray-blue ones or Alma's green.

Once in a while he allowed himself a chuckle at how Junior, from her appearance, might as well have been his daughter and Jack's; seemed the perfect fusing of them, anyway, if such a thing were possible. Jack's brown eyes, they were, and his dark hair though with gentle waves in place of his tight curls. Summers browned her skin like Jack's, not burnt it like it did Francie's or Ennis's when he was younger. She had Ennis's long, narrow face instead of Jack's round one, Ennis's thin nose and close-set ears. And Jack's big-toothed grin though on cheeks that nearly weren't wide enough to contain it. But Ennis never let the thought linger much longer than a passing smile, because that thought beget thoughts of the mountains, of a ranch together someday, of coins filling up the coffee tin in the back of the cupboard, and that in turn led inexorably to images of tire irons and ditches and blood soaking into the dusty ground. Push it away, he knew; hold it down, suppressed, choked. Open the cupboard every evening, drop the money in, truck needs a new transmission right?—just drop it in without thinking on what it's really for, easier that way, safer.

He finished shaving, dug his tackle box out from under winter clothes and horse blankets in the closet, then rushed into the kitchenette to gulp down the remnants of yesterday's coffee he'd left on the stove. Francie had moved on to dusting the opposite window; Junior still leaned over the little table on the floor. Ennis had a mouthful of cold coffee when he realized what he'd left out on that table the night before. Coffee and air mixed in a gasp down his windpipe. He bent over the sink, coughed and spat, the pot clanging on the floor, coffee splattering. The girls whirled around, the stack of postcards still in Junior's hand. Jack's postcards.

"Are you okay?" Francie asked, and Ennis nodded, held up a hand reassuringly, still coughing out the last of it.

"Coffee too strong?" Junior teased once she saw that he was alright.

"Somethin like that," he finally replied, stooping and halfheartedly wiping up the mess rather than making eye contact with her. _Why ya gettin so worked up? They're just pictures of mountains, they don't hardly say nothin...except the one._ By the time he stood up, Junior was waiting by the door with her sister, the postcards collected into a poised stack in the center of the table. On top of the pile, like a star crowning a Christmas tree, perched a smaller stack: four torn rectangles, edges tattered, that had once formed a picture of the mountains past Grand Junction, Colorado, mailed September 22, 1973, ragged, warped, and faded from a year tucked in Ennis's chest pocket. He'd kept it there until the sweat and sun and wind took its toll on it, then stowed it somewhere safer. Only after the argument on their last trip did the card find its way back into Ennis's shirt. But he couldn't put it back in his pocket now—Junior had seen it. It had to be just a regular old postcard until the girls were gone, had to stay there on the table like it didn't mean so much.

"Come on, Daddy, the fish are all gonna swim away!" Francie shouted, halfway down the front steps.

"Don't you worry, I told a couple of em to wait around til ya got there," Ennis called. One glance back at the postcards, then out the door, down the stairs, back up, forgot the keys right there on the counter; yep, postcards still there too, going for real now. They packed into the truck, Junior in the middle seat even though Francie was smaller. Ennis worked the key, engine finally turning over once the cab was filled with dust and exhaust and they had to open the windows wide.

Out on the paved road, wind barreling in, he realized he wasn't used to feeling the cold come in through that front pocket.

"Ennis,

Took the long way home. Damn truck broke down halfway up that peak on the front. Real nice country there, not even cold. Let me know about December. We oughta go there, figure its right in the middle. And it ain't cold.

Love, Jack"

They didn't meet in Grand Junction, they met in the same Wyoming mountains as always, and before Jack had even stepped out of his truck, Ennis was stomping over waving the post card like an angry finger. "What're ya thinkin?" he growled from twenty feet away, more of an accusation than a question. Jack's eyebrows raised beneath his hat, his smile sagged. That wasn't quite what Ennis had planned to say, but still his boots kept on stomping. "What're ya thinkin, writin somethin like that?" He shoved the postcard in Jack's face, finger pressed white against the word. Love. "Christ, Jack, writin that shit out in the open for the goddamn world to see." _But did ya mean it? Say ya meant it, say so. Say it out loud cause Lord knows I can't._

"It's—it's just a greetin," Jack stammered, his voice notches below Ennis's, "like sayin 'hello,' 'goodbye.' Shit, I dunno, I didn't give it that much thought."

_I did—been thinkin bout it a month now, bent it all up from keepin it in my pocket, can't ya see that? Can't ya see it without me havin to say it?_ And he didn't say it. "That's your problem right there—ya don't think about things, never mind the consequences, just sayin whatever comes into your head like a damn coyote singin to the moon."

"Consequences? It's a fuckin postcard." Jack laughed, but it echoed bitter off the mountains.

"What if they seen it at the post office, huh? What then? It ain't safe. I gotta live here, y'know. What if the mailman read that—that last part?" He still couldn't speak it, couldn't even repeat the word. Even just reading it off with no sentiment, it caught in his throat like a bur, choking.

"The post office ain't got time to be readin your business. Anyway, if they did, who's to say I ain't your brother? Or your daddy or cousin or someone?"

"...My daddy wouldn't a wrote somethin like that to me. Cousin mighta," Ennis said, relenting.

"Yeah," Jack agreed through a long sigh, "well, my daddy wouldn't a sent me a letter to begin with." Another empty chuckle. He hopped out of the truck, no anger but skipping their usual embrace as he walked past, in its place sliding one hand across Ennis's chest, across the pocket that the post card had lived in since September 30th, down his side, grazing his clenched fist, leaving a path of fire like a fuse. "Okay, I won't write it again," he said easily, grabbing a bag from the back of the truck.

"Jack, I..." _Write it again. Don't give in that easy. Write it all over the postcard, keep writin it on every goddamn one ya send... Keep singin._ The word stuck in his throat, thorns digging in, windpipe strangling around it, pain in shards like something bursting in his chest. The only sound that squeezed through emerged somewhere between a curse and a grunt. Jack threw his hands up in surrender, shuffling over to poke at the fire. Ennis stormed around the other side of the truck, kicked a rock until he felt his toenail split and couldn't feel much else. Bleeding was simpler than that other thing anyway: boots off, wrap something around it, apply pressure, river would wash out the blotches on his sock, no words required.


	2. Chapter 2

Junior reclined in one of the folding canvas lawn chairs they'd brought; Francie paced trails into the lake's shore. "Daddy, the fish are all gonna be gone," the younger girl huffed with a dramatic placement of fists on hips. Ennis held a hook in one hand and a line in the other and for the life of him couldn't seem to get the two to meet just right.

"Nah, they're still jumpin," Junior told her hopefully, shading her eyes to peer out over the wide lake. Perturbations in the ripples' gentle rhythm told of trout pouncing for insects, of shiny-scaled bodies briefly gaining flight, as if whatever fluttered through the air was so marvelous it compelled them to gaze skyward and send themselves soaring. She always looked an instant too late to glimpse the fish himself, saw only the wake he left, imperfect circles radiating outward. Splashes caught the sun in droplets, scattered it. The tip of a silvery tail fin ducked between two ripples. Big one this time.

Ennis stuck his arms out straight ahead to better focus but ended up only seeing the hook fumble out of his fingers. He cursed in a breath, not accustomed to delicate tasks. Years had armored his hands with rough callouses; arthritis had started to swell in his knuckles, more in his right hand than left. Not to mention he'd needed glasses since high school. He would've been there for hours pawing around in the dirt for that hook, but Junior leaned over and retrieved it, grabbed a line and had it threaded in seconds. "Fingers are gettin too old for this," he said, and flexed his hand until the knuckles cracked. Junior handed the line back to him to tie, which he could've done even with his eyes closed and fingers frozen, because he knew a thing or two about knots.

Francie skipped over, sounding nonplussed. "Well what are you gonna do when you're out on a fishing trip and Junior's not around to put the hook on for you?"

Junior answered before Ennis had a chance to: "Silly, Daddy's friend could always do it." Ennis almost dropped the hook again.

The few times they actually went fishing, Jack did in fact tie the lines. Ennis recalled watching Jack's fingers work a knot around the hook for what seemed like ages, trying to get it perfect. "What's that your tyin, some big ol fancy Texas knot?" Ennis had said. He smiled at the memory, let Jack's hands into his consciousness for a moment but tried not to dwell on that, as it wasn't proper. _Don't think about Jack, think about fishin_, he scolded himself, but thinking about fishing made him think of "fishing trips," and fishing trips were him and Jack and the mountains and the tent and the breaths, and he yelled at himself _think about _real_ fishin!_

Meanwhile, Junior had threaded the other two hooks.

They sat on the shore above a deep pool, three lines cast out in front of them bobbing over ripples, crossing occasionally in the current. Junior dangled one bare foot down, her big toe haphazardly skimming the lake's surface. Had Ennis been any kind of fisherman, he might've warned her about scaring away the fish, but then again the day wasn't really about fishing anyway. Francie did her part to frighten the fish by bouncing around in her chair like a rubber ball, jogging the fishing line; Ennis wondered where she got the energy, and wished he had a tenth of it still.

"Does it always take so long for the fish to bite?" the younger girl asked.

_Probably wouldn't if I knew what in the hell I was doin_, Ennis thought, but replied only "sometimes."

"Maybe when one fish bites, the rest of them will join in and then they'll all start biting and we'll catch a bunch of them," Francie mused, her eyes wide. "How many fish do you and Jack usually catch? Do you catch a bunch?"

Ennis twitched at his daughter's mention of the name and hoped no one noticed his hand jerk the fishing line. It surprised him she remembered Jack at all—she hadn't been more than seven or eight the one time they were introduced. He wondered now if Alma had been telling them things.

"Oh, we uh...we catch enough," he said as he scrutinized the dirt between his feet. He touched the empty pocket where the postcard usually insulated his chest. Couldn't lie to them, couldn't exactly tell them the full truth either.

After that one calamitous Thanksgiving Ennis spent with Alma and Munroe nearly ten years ago, he and Jack made a promise to pull off the tags and finally use the fishing poles they'd been carrying around as a disguise since 1967. Neither of them had fished since they were kids, and even then only with sticks instead of real equipment. But they figured, how hard could it be?Besides, after having gone on so many "fishing trips," it wasn't as though they could ask anyone for pointers now. It took them until damn near the following November to actually catch anything; had they known fishing was such difficult business, they might've gone on "hunting trips" all those years instead.

"Daddy, tell us a fishing story!" Francie yipped. "Tell us about the biggest fish you ever caught or the farthest lake you ever went to or something. Maybe the fish'll start biting once they hear what a good fisherman you are."

Ennis snorted a little laugh. "Well, now, I dunno about that..."

"Aw, come on, you must have a buncha good stories," Junior chimed in.

_Few that can be repeated though_, Ennis thought. And fewer he'd want to tell anyway, because he didn't talk about Jack, he just didn't. Especially not to his girls—never seemed right to discuss the man he'd cheated on their mother with, just like they did their best not to bring up Munroe. Now and then, when guys at work got to chatting, Ennis would mention fishing and hunting trips, mumble a couple words about elk, trout, horses. When he lived with Alma, he said just enough to keep her at bay. But he never told stories, because what if he let something slip and everyone found out about him and Jack? What if they could just tell from the way he spoke, from the smile sneaking out on his hard weathered face, and what if that smile seemed a little too fond for talking about a fishing buddy, what if his eyes lost themselves a little too much on memories of mountains? He figured it best not to start talking about their trips at all. He could've told a hundred stories, but everything intertwined: the mountains and the wind and their laughter and breaths and their bodies in the tent under the stars. Too easy to say the wrong thing.

"Please, Daddy? Just one story?" Francie said in a drawn-out whine. There were a couple things in the world Ennis had a weakness for—whiskey being one, as Francie had astutely pointed out. Another was hearing his girls' voices, especially when they called him "Daddy"; and of course looking into the wide doe-eyes of the three people he cared about more than life, two of whom he was sitting beside on the lake shore. He smiled defeatedly, ran a hand under his hat to wipe away the sweat, breathed a long sigh. He had fishing stories, sure, but what started off as fishing... Well, he could tell them _parts_ of stories, anyhow. And maybe if he minimized Jack's role, gave him no more than a cameo appearance, then he could talk about it without either choking up or saying too much, and it would be alright after all.

"Okay, okay, I'll tell ya bout the first time I went fishin—first time since I was more'n knee-high to my dad anyway." That'd be a good story, and it really was about fishing and not too much about Jack, though it was the same trip after Jack had sent that post card. "Well, I was campin by a big ol lake. I had me a bran-new fishin pole, bran-new hooks—" Brand new in 1967, that was, though perhaps by 1973 "unused" would've been more realistic. "—an I just knew I was goin a catch a whole buncha fish with them shiny new lures. I was so sure, I didn't bother bringin nothin else to eat, except a few cans a beans in the truck—but I didn't bring a can opener since I knew I'd catch so many fish." The girls giggled, having an inkling as to how their father's predictions had turned out. "Nothin was bitin much, but I said I was goin a sit there til I caught a fish even if it took the whole day. Trouble was, it was December, an a cold one. Now, Jack, he rodeoed back in the day an he's got this ol tear in his knee, always locks up in bad weather—tell ya when a storm's comin better'n the weatherman on the news. So I was waitin for all my fish but Jack gave up after a couple a hours an said he was goin a hunt down somethin to eat because a big storm was goin a hit. I figured by time he got back I'd a caught a whole pile a fish bigger'n some rabbit he might get. Anyway, the storm hit an I lasted out in the snow an hail another hour before I ran back to camp. Jack's truck was gone so I thought maybe he shot somethin big an had to drive out to get it. I got a fire goin good, reinforced my tent a bit, then sat around waitin. I waited til the sun set an the sky got black before I ended up usin a rock to break open a can a beans." His daughters laughed again and he realized how much a person can miss a sound they don't hear nearly enough. Telling stories hadn't turned out so bad after all. He just wouldn't mention how worried he'd been that Jack had gotten stuck in the snowstorm or eaten by a bear or had just gotten tired of Ennis's bullshit, how Ennis had pressed his palm into his chest pocket where that post card was tucked away and had lost more than a few tears into the dirt already soaked through with the first soggy layer of snow. "Well, it must a been ten at night when I saw headlights comin up the road. There was nothin else around for miles so I knew it was Jack. He hopped out a the truck soakin wet an covered head to toe in mud, so I was expectin somethin real big, a elk or buffalo or somethin, heck, maybe a elephant—I could a eaten one by then—but ya know what he brought back?"

"A rabbit?" Francie asked through a toothy grin.

"Nope, smaller'n a rabbit," Ennis said.

"A fish?" asked Junior.

Ennis shook his head. "Nope, wasn't a fish neither. Jack opened the truck door an pulled out a pizza. An now I think of it, it was a extra-large an might a been bigger'n a rabbit after all." The girls cracked up laughing and Ennis smiled, at his daughters and at the memory both. He'd mentioned Jack more than he'd intended, but that was alright, kind of necessary to the story anyway; he'd just keep the real ending to himself:

Ennis had never been so glad to see headlights in his life. His eyes followed them up the road; time stalled. Once he could hear the crunch of tires through the dirt and snow he gulped the first deep breath he'd taken since sunset, raw ache of the past five hours churned up inside his chest and frozen there. Jack flung open the truck door and slid down within a veil of the heater's hot breath that billowed out and turned to steam and rose. Ennis's face absorbed the warmth, burned with it, prickles in his nose and cheeks the first notable sensation in hours. He'd been numb for a long while. "Look what I caught us for dinner," Jack said, all smiles, pointing back with his thumb. "It was a clean kill—it went down real quick, didn't suffer or nothin."

Ennis stared at him, at the mud slathering his clothes, the dripping ringlets in his hair from melted snow, then at the storm clouds, and beyond them, the diluted hint of a moon. In the shadow-trees past the fire's reach, an owl hooted soft and low, a sleepy welcome to the night. Snowflakes drifted down, the last of the storm or perhaps an interlude. One landed on Ennis's cheek; his skin flushed at its touch. The numbness broke, his body releasing itself to shivers, first in his fists and then his stone-set jaw. A lone drop of steam or snow or tears trickled down his cheek, lost itself in the stubble. He grabbed the front of Jack's shirt, bunching up handfuls of mud-slick fabric.

"Where in the hell were you?" Ennis's voice faltered.

Jack's smile faded just enough to unclench the dimples in his cheeks. "I told ya, I went to find us some dinner."

"Goddamn it, I thought ya was gone for good... I mean... like ya got eaten up by a bear or somethin." Ennis added on the last part to try not to sound so much like a fussing wife, figured Jack could see through it anyhow.

"Naw, I wouldn't a left ya out here just cause ya can't fish worth shit." Jack's voice was buoyant again and his smile returned, dimples filling alternately with firelight and shadow. That smile usually worked on Ennis; this time, Ennis's face only scrunched up, furrowed brow hiding his glistening slits of eyes. "Ennis..." Jack sighed gently, "Look, I'm sorry, I just went down the road a bit, figured I could get a deer or somethin an—"

Ennis pulled Jack against his chest hard enough to knock the wind out of both of them, stretching his arms around Jack's wide shoulders, hands roving, grasping, fingers tangling in the wet mop of curls. He let his chin rest on Jack's hair and inhaled a scent he'd thought he might never breathe again. The embrace threatened to smother but Jack understood, and would've reciprocated except Ennis had his arms pinned. So Jack leaned into it, pliable, and kept talking, words muffled in Ennis's jacket. "I stood out there shiverin my ass off for a hour before I figured I wouldn't catch nothin—the animals all got more sense'n we do to be out in the storm like this. So I drove down to that last little town. I would a let ya know but I thought if I hurried I could beat the storm. Guess not though." Ennis felt the words more than heard them, vibrations like a racing heartbeat permeating his skin. Where their chests met, Ennis felt the sharp edges of the post card like a prickly thorn between them, still freshly folded then, not yet worn at the creases. He released his grip the slightest bit until it sat right. Jack took a breath. "Well, that road was a bitch gettin back up. The truck got stuck in the mud an it took me goddamn two hours to dig it out. An y'know what was standin there starin at me when I come out from under the truck? A big ol buck, right there on the side a the road. Swear to God he was laughin. An he just stood there too, probably knew I was too goddamn cold to bother. Anyway, I didn't mean—"

"Hold on now, what do ya got in there?" Ennis asked, relaxing his grip on Jack as he peered at the truck's fogged-over window.

"Wait til ya see—I think it was my best hunt yet." Jack opened the truck door and gestured for Ennis to get in. "Well go on, you're lettin the heat out."

Ennis thought he recognized the smell that filled the cab but he couldn't place it, not out there in the pines and snow where it didn't match. He reached forward blindly until he touched a box, sensed Jack smiling behind him, and put things together. "Pizza? Ya got a pizza?"

"I was goin a get whatever I could get from whatever was open. I was hopin you'd at least catch some anchovies to go on top."

In a light-quick motion Ennis turned and leaned forward, wedging the pizza box on the dashboard above the steering wheel and latching onto Jack again. Hands grappled, fingers teased, skin flushed, and their mouths met slightly off center in the darkness. Condensation beaded on the windows: the need between them wet and tangible. Light gathered within each droplet, on one side of the truck the dancing campfire, on the other the still, cool moon; somewhere in the middle they coalesced. Ennis lay down on the seat and pulled Jack on top of him between his legs and whispered something trite about getting him out of the muddy clothes.

"Whoa there, cowboy!" Jack laughed, propping himself back up. "I've been smellin that pizza for four hours now an I didn't so much as take a bite without you. I dunno if I can wait."

It turned out Ennis's "couldn't wait" was stronger than Jack's "couldn't wait," so the pizza waited on the dashboard for another twenty minutes and Jack's clothes waited in a muddy heap on the floor of the truck, and outside the coyotes waited to sing until the mountains were quiet again.

No, Ennis wouldn't tell that part of the story to anyone, and had to keep himself from thinking much about it too, at least in the company of others.

"Tell us another story!" Francie said, her fishing pole dangling like an afterthought.

"Yeah, one where ya actually catch some fish," Junior snickered.

"Very funny," Ennis said. He couldn't recall such an easy day with his daughters in a while, Alma and Munroe always bringing their crap into it. Good thing it turned out to be fishing instead of church, too. "Alright then, it just so happens there was a time I caught five big ol fish, an I only stopped at five cause it was a long ways back to camp an I had to carry em all. Who knows how many I would a caught if I kept at it." Ennis nodded; the girls seemed amused. And this time he'd keep Jack out of the story better. He'd also leave out how that was the only time he and Jack combined had caught more than two fish. "It was a day or two before Halloween—the year you dressed up as a angel," he said to Francie, and then turned to Junior, "an you dressed up as a black cat."

"You remember that?" Francie, only nine that year, couldn't separate her memory of it from the other two years she'd been an angel.

"Course I do—you were the prettiest angel in the whole town," Ennis said, but couldn't explain the bigger reason—how that was the last time he'd seen his daughters dress up for Halloween, one of the last memories he had of them being little girls. Munroe had taken a photo of them and Ennis asked him for a copy but eight years later still didn't have one. He changed the subject back to fishing before he could start thinking too hard on that, but decided in the back of his mind that it was about time to ask Munroe for the photo again.

He told the girls about that October, about Halloween and the weather, talked about whatever else he could think of as if filling the afternoon with words would stretch it out farther. That year he worked for Hal Woodrich, who owned 100,000 acres and was generous with time off and stingy with money. He had more ranch hands than he probably needed and hadn't minded Ennis taking off three times that year; Ennis sure tested how far that luck could be pushed. The days were fickle, fall and winter squabbling over the air. Almost every morning Ennis rode out on the ranch with three shirts on and came back wearing just the undershirt, or the other way around. When he and Jack had left on their trip the nights were sinking below freezing, but they went fishing that one day with their sleeves rolled up—an indian summer, or at least an afternoon of it.

Maybe the weather's dithering confused the trees too, Jack mused as they hiked up to the lake through a foot of fallen leaves, their steps comically exaggerated as if plodding through snow. Birch and cottonwood like gold raindrops, calico maples, oak still holding green; Ennis remembered the leaves more than anything else about that autumn: rolling through them, stirring them up in swells as he and Jack tumbled over and over, finally sinking in. Leaves like a well-worn bed beneath his chest, his face pressed into their heady scent of rain and earth and pine, Jack all over him, hands groping fistfuls of maple and birch. Afterward they scoured the woods up and down the hill to collect all their clothing. Jack's shirt held out until the last, the autumn ground a perfect camouflage for plaid, while Jack stood shirtless in the woods with crumpled bits of leaves adorning his hair like a wreath.

But there was still fishing to tell about. "Maybe it was the bait we used that day," Ennis said, thinking back on their drunken laughter across the campfire at what had started out as a joke the night before. "We could try beans," Jack had said, pointing at a half-empty can that neither of them much cared to finish. They'd forgotten to bring bait, an easy thing to forget with fishing being such a new addition to their fishing trips. They laughed about it over whiskey and embers, but the next morning they slept in late and didn't want to waste daylight digging for worms. Eight fish later between them, they figured they'd discovered some great fishing secret. "Probably just the weather though," Ennis told the girls: languid afternoon, sunshine and leaf showers and insects droning in the tall grass, the last flourish of autumn, winter hissing crisp at the wind's edges.

"We was out there til sunset cause a how many fish we were catchin—trout mostly, except Jack hooked one big ugly ol fish." Ennis made a face to illustrate and the girls laughed even though he knew they were too old for funny faces. "We didn't know what it was—looked like some kind a monster. I wasn't goin a eat it but Jack said we caught it so we shouldn't waste it an it might end up bein good besides. Well, that got us talkin bout monsters since it was Halloween time an all, tellin scary stories to try an spook ourselves. We was walking along side the creek back to camp and Jack was tryin a convince me that when he stopped for gas someone in town warned him about those very woods. He was tellin me—" Ennis leaned in, lowered his voice for effect "—that the ghosts of Indians killed by settlers a hundred years ago haunt the woods, and every Halloween night they come out to get revenge on livin folks, specially campers out all alone in the dark."

"Was it true?" Francie asked, wide-eyed. "Were you scared?"

Ennis flopped back in his chair. "Naw, Jack was full of it an he's a terrible liar, couldn't hardly keep a straight face. He was tryin not to laugh while he was tellin me that when the Indians came they'd only go after me since he's part Indian, his momma told him—dunno if that part's true or not, could be. Anyway, so we was headin down along the creek, an right when Jack got to the good part a his story somethin ran out from the trees across the trail not a foot away. It was dark but the moon was near bright as daylight, so I could see it was a wolverine ran out in front of us, a big one too—55, 60 pounds at least, big as a dog. Now, Jack'll tell ya it was a marmot, but don't believe a word he says. I got a good look at it, saw its teeth an claws even, an that was no marmot, it was a wolverine...or at least a badger or a...porcupine or something, but it sure as hell wasn't no marmot. Well, when that big ol wolverine ran out I took a step back to let it pass—ya don't mess with wolverines—but the leaves on the ground was wet an I slipped an fell back into the creek. Jack'll tell ya I startled an jumped an he might even say I screamed, but like I said, you shouldn't believe him." The girls exchanged glances, snickering through tight smiles. "I dunno where the wolverine went, but Jack was standin on the bank pointin down at me an laughing himself silly. He laughed so hard he slipped on the leaves too an ended up right next to me in the water, an he didn't even have the sense to hold onto his fish like I did so they drifted on down the creek, which served him right." The other thing Jack would've said was how he hadn't so much tripped on leaves as on Ennis's foot kicking his ankles.

Thinking of the lost fish reminded Ennis of another fishing trip, and he barely took a breath before continuing, chuckling already at the memory of it. At least the girls seemed entertained, distracted from the lack of biting fish, and at least he was finally talking to them, more words in that hour than he'd spoken in the last year, which was something he'd been thinking for a while he should work on changing. "There was another time, the last time we went fishin in fact, an it was good weather so I bet half the state was out there fishin too. Lucky there was even one fish left for me to catch. Jack didn't catch nothin."

"Did you try fishing with beans again?" Francie asked.

"No, we ate the beans that night since we only caught the one fish."

"Are there beans in all your stories?"

"Yeah, it seems like they're bean stories more'n fishin stories," Junior giggled along with her sister.

"Beans ain't somethin to take for granted," Ennis said, feigning seriousness. "Anyhow, if ya look at it that way, this ain't really a fishin story _or_ a bean story, it's a popcorn story. Now, Jack's got less confidence in us fishin than I do—maybe cause I'm the one usually catches most a the fish—so he comes prepared with all kinds a things, an that time he had poppin corn. Round midnight he got hungry cause all he ate was half a can a beans, so he poured a bunch a poppin corn in a skillet an stuck it over the fire. I told him that wasn't goin a work but he said sure it would, he said he did it that way all the time over the stove at home, so I shrugged an went on back to whittlin somethin an I figured sooner or later he'd be askin me for another can a beans. Well, in a minute I heard a POP! an then a couple a more pops, an Jack was lookin all smug an he just barely said 'I told ya—' before there was about a thousand pops an poppin corn was goin everywhere, some of it popped an most of it not. Some a the kernels flew all the way over where I was sittin an hit me in the face. They was hittin Jack all over—he was coverin his face with one arm—so what did he do? He dropped the pan an it fell straight into the fire, an he ran an ducked behind a log, that dumbass. Then the poppin corn was _really_ goin everywhere. The kernels were hittin the truck even, sounded like a hail storm, an some was poppin up an catchin fire an shootin out like meteors. I ran an ducked behind the log then too an it kept on poppin for five minutes at least, flamin popcorn flyin over our heads, lucky it didn't start a forest fire." Ennis couldn't contain a few chuckles, remembering how hard he and Jack had laughed that night, rolling around on the ground behind the old pine log, drunk silly and flinching at every boom from the fire. Eventually it slowed, leaving just a few residual pops: the stragglers, the last few flaming streaks across the summer sky. Ennis watched them soar past and his eyes dizzied and his laughter slowed and his heart raced, and he made a wish on each one, a wish on burning popcorn of all things, but at that moment they were shooting stars and Jack was pressed up tight and warm beside him on the ground and anything was possible.

"What did you do?" Francie asked.

"Waited til it stopped, then opened up a can a beans," Ennis replied, lost in nostalgia over Jack and the girls both. He wanted to talk to them forever, telling them stories as if they were still little girls in that apartment over the laundromat, but he felt himself edging too close to that point where he might say something wrong, let something slip, and then what? What would his girls think if they knew the truth? That was why he didn't talk about Jack, because talking about Jack was like everything else with Jack: once Ennis got started he couldn't seem to stop, and found out he didn't much want to stop either. But rousing all those memories weighted each word with the totality of them: long lonely months measured out by counting down days, brief fiery mountain nights extinguished too quick, and the bleakness of the weeks since their last trip in May and their fight and all the things he'd said and all the more things he hadn't said.

He sniffled hard, clearing his throat. Somehow his voice came out hearty, almost cheerful. "Alright now, I told ya bout fishin, I think it's your turn to tell me a story." He glanced over at them, caught the side of Junior's shy smile before it vanished behind a curtain of her dark curls as she whisked her gaze down toward her rippling reflection.

"A story about what?" Francie asked.

Junior responded before Ennis had a chance to, unable to contain it any longer: "I think I've got a good story for ya." She kept her face averted but Ennis knew she was smiling, recognized the weightlessness at the edges of her words like the way Jack spoke when his hat was pulled down low and all Ennis could see sticking out was the upturned end of his cigarette puffing up clouds of smoke and dreams. From her coat pocket Junior withdrew her hand and something on it held the midday sun and glittered. She glanced up finally, eyes questioning, wanting approval, lips tight around a smile that couldn't quite be repressed. Her voice barely carried over the water lapping at the shore: "Daddy... Kurt asked me to marry him."


	3. Chapter 3

_On Junior's first day of elementary school she wore a pink knee-length dress, a hand-me-down from Alma's sister's daughter, adorned with a big embroidered flower that the sister had sewn on to cover a stain and make it look not so worn. Ennis was between jobs and walked Junior to school, carrying a backpack he guessed weighed half as much as she did, little slip of a girl that she was, tall and thin like him. He held her hand the whole five blocks there, stooping down on one side, and when they reached the door of the school room he loosened his grip on her tiny palm and found himself hoping she'd keep clinging to him like when he and Alma had taken her to kindergarten the year before. But she caught sight of a neighborhood friend inside and slipped away, nearly forgetting her backpack, pigtails bouncing behind her. Ennis stood there for a moment in case she ran back out crying like in kindergarten, but she didn't, and an empty wind of early autumn whistled through the schoolyard and bent the dry stalks of grasses, and he walked back home and lost the day in a bottle of whiskey until it was time to walk back to school to pick her up again._

Ennis realized his long silence, knew Junior was waiting for his blessing or at least acquiescence, but what could he say? Did any father really want his little girl to get married? But he couldn't say no either, not with her staring at him like that—eyes bright with all her plans and dreams, sparkling more than that ring. "Kurt..." he finally managed to utter. "What happened to...what's his name..." Francie was staring at him too by that time. "Oh, well, that don't matter... I mean... I uh... He's good to ya, Kurt is?"

"Yeah, Daddy, he sure is," she said, smile swelling in her cheeks.

Ennis fumbled for words, lips sucking at the air like a caught fish, and finally nodded his approval, unclenched his teeth, unfurrowed his brow, tried to smile and hoped at least he didn't look cross. Junior got the message anyway. She dropped her fishing pole, knelt down beside him and hugged him probably as tight as she ever had since clinging to his leg that day in kindergarten, and he hugged her back almost as tight as he'd wanted to that day he'd let her go in first grade. "Daddy, thank you! You'll come to the weddin, won't you?"

Francie answered for him. "You have to come—it'll be so nice! It's gonna be the first Sunday in August, and they're getting married in the church and then the reception's in the church school room with that big courtyard outside, and Munroe's gonna arrange for all the food and drinks, and Mom's altering a wedding dress—Aunt Grace's, not Mom's, since Mom's was too small—and..." Francie listed everyone they planned to invite, a small gathering, family and a few friends and neighbors, some Ennis knew, most he didn't. He sat there staggered and trying to listen but either the lost expression on his face or the small choking sound that emerged when he tried to swallow finally made Francie pause. "You'll be there...won't you?"

"I uh... Ya know I would, darlin, it's just... I got a work..." He squinted at the dirt between his feet, poked a tuft of grass with the toe of his boot, and found his brow re-furrowing and his jaw re-clenching despite his best efforts.

"That's okay," Junior said, a forced smile the only thing distinguishing her expression from her father's.

"It's just, Stoutamire ain't got enough help, can't afford it, an I'll be startin the baler about then. I'm real sorry."

"It's okay, I understand."

"I asked Stoutamire for time off in August already but he says he can't spare me til November. I'm real sorry... I mean... Ya need money or somethin? How's it all gettin paid for? " He had no idea why he'd asked or what he'd do if she said yes; he was already saving as much as he could but that coffee tin wasn't yet filled high enough to do much good with it.

"No, Daddy, I don't need anything. It ain't gonna be fancy anyhow, an Momma an Munroe are takin care of the reception, so...I just thought if you could get off work maybe..."

A flicker of anger fizzled in him and burnt out by the time he even put thoughts to it—why couldn't anyone understand that he had to work, that ranch work was certainly not the easiest job, not the one they'd choose, but was all he knew? And then a different thought drowned the anger, made him wonder what kind of father misses his first daughter's wedding to bale hay, what kind of father lets some other man pay for the wedding and walk her down the isle and dance with her at the reception? Damned if he'd let that happen. And damn Stoutamire, stingy old bastard, and damn that ranch, going under anyway within a year, and damn working his whole life and getting nothing out of it except a broken down horse trailer and a broken up family and a pair of sad doe eyes looking up at him no matter what he tried to do, always the sad eyes. "Ya know what, forget Stoutamire," he said, favoring a different word but not in front of his daughters. "It ain't every day my little girl gets married."

Junior bounced up like one of the trout leaping from the lake. "So you'll come?"

"Sure will, darlin." He'd find another job. Always did. Sometime before August, he'd quit, maybe give notice, maybe not. Probably for the best anyway, with Stoutamire's ranch headed downhill, and maybe then he could find work with Joe Miller again whose operation was still going strong the next town over. He had two months to figure it out. And maybe if he worked hard until then, he could save enough money, and...

"Daddy, Francie's got some news too," Junior said, for once speaking before her sister.

Something within him was kindled. He smiled over at his younger daughter. "News, huh? Wait a minute, lemme see your fingers."

"What for?" she objected, holding her hands out anyway, fishing pole wedged between her knees.

Ennis inspected them closely. "Good, no ring," he said, winking. He couldn't imagine what her news actually was.

"Daddy!" laughed Francie, rolling her eyes, then teased back: "How do you know he just hasn't given me a ring yet?"

It turned out to be college, and not just the community college most of the kids went to if they went anywhere at all, but the Colorado University down in Boulder. Francie would be a high school senior in September—a year younger than most due to an early fall birthday—and her guidance counselor had beamed over her last report card and thought she had a good chance at an early decision admission and a scholarship. She wanted to be a teacher, maybe a writer too. Ennis choked up again, wished he could give them more than hugs and nods but that coffee can split three ways now would hardly buy them dinner. The money didn't matter to them, he knew, and Junior assured him the best wedding present in the world would be him showing up, but the inefficacy still gnawed at him.

"There is one little thing maybe you could do," Francie said slowly, twisting the fishing pole around in her fingers, a portent glance begging help from her sister. Maybe because Junior was his first daughter, or because she had always asked for less, Ennis found it harder to say no to her; maybe because she had sadder eyes.

"We never been to Colorado," Junior said. "We was hopin when you come down for the weddin... It's just, Francie oughta see the school first so she'll know if she likes it."

Nervousness rose up in him at the thought of the long drive, and the thought of taking his daughter even farther away. "Munroe probably been to Boulder, maybe you could..."

"That ain't the point," Junior muttered.

Francie found her voice again. "I don't want Munroe to take us. If he takes us, he'd have to bring the boys, and I hate driving with them. They're impatient and loud—" Ennis couldn't help smiling at that, coming from Francie "—and all they do is either complain or tease or make crude noises. Please, Daddy, we want you to take us."

Ennis had no idea how far Boulder was from Riverton—felt like halfway around the world, since he'd never been out of Wyoming himself—but that's where his little girl was headed next fall so that's where he'd take her. So he told her you bet, if his truck would make it, and said he'd walk her there if not. He figured Boulder was bigger than any city he'd been to, probably bigger than anything in Wyoming. And he felt pretty confident, though he'd never been to one, that big cities were full of trouble, no place for a little country girl like Francie to go on her own when the farthest she'd ever traveled from home was visiting her grandma in Casper. If he drove her down there, at least he could check out the city, make sure it was safe enough for her—as much as his assessment would be worth, with him not knowing exactly which kind of big city troubles he was worried about.

Times like that, he got to wishing Jack were around. Jack knew about big cities. He'd probably even been to Boulder. Ennis had habituated himself to the roads between Riverton and Signal, but beyond that familiar stretch he felt lost. If he could've ridden a horse everywhere, he would've, or at least a tractor. He preferred roads with one lane and no pavement, he hated the interstates, and traffic lights made him nervous. And out there toward the big cities, his narrow dirt roads distended into multi-lane highways that branched into a dozen roads in every direction, and each of those roads branched outward, and each one headed somewhere unknowable. When he thought of the world unfurling like that, it was dizzying.

Not to Jack, though. Jack, full of restlessness, needing to wander; Jack who had the open roads running through his body like veins. He told Ennis one time that he'd driven back home through as many states as he could: Wyoming to South Dakota, Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas, back to Colorado, Oklahoma, and finally into Texas. Another time he went West through Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico, pondered California but knew the truck wouldn't make it through the Sierras. He could probably tell Ennis all about Boulder and every town in between here and there, because he looked at those sprawling roads and saw possibilities, and half the time turned his truck straight toward them.

Out on the lake a fish jumped, leaving ripples. A second later, a sudden tug on Francie's line nearly jerked the pole out of her hand. Lunging forward, Ennis caught the pole by the reel and steadied it.

"I caught one! I caught me a fish!" Francie shrieked, her practiced diction slipping back to vernacular as often happened when she was excited.

Ennis held the reel until she had a firm grip on it. "Ya sure did, darlin! Go on an reel him in."

"He's a strong one!" The pole bent like a sapling in a storm. Francie braced her foot against a rock.

"Keep the line tight so he can't unhook himself, and pull up on the pole too while you turn the reel," said Ennis, and that constituted just about all his expertise on the subject and only worked for him about two thirds of the time.

Francie tugged and reeled and Ennis kept waiting for the snap of the pole or the line or both, but a minute later the lake erupted with a tremendous thrashing, water churning with froth and fury, droplets and scales flashing silvery green. When the tail fin cleared the surface, he knelt on the shore and grabbed the line—fish flailing, whipping the air, flinging off cold water. Head averted, Ennis reached for the fish, felt it slip away twice before he got a rigid hold on it in two unyielding hands. It writhed against him, muscles straining beneath slick scales, but thick calluses shielded Ennis's skin from the sharp fins that had cut him once when he was younger. Knees cracking, he stood, hunched over the fish as he moved it away from the lake. Big one, it was. Bigger than anything he'd ever caught before.

Fish wedged securely between one hand and his chest, he went to pull out the hook. "Daddy!" Junior whimpered. Her eyes were about as wide as the fish's.

"What's a matter?"

"You're just gonna rip the hook right out? Won't it hurt?"

"He ain't gonna be feelin nothin in a minute." That logic didn't seem to help. "Well, I can just wait an take it out after..." Her mouth scrunched up, jaw clenched. "Well we're goin a eat him, ain't we? He's big enough for dinner for all three of us."

Junior shifted in her chair, focused out on the lake and quickly reeled her line in before anything else could bite. "I dunno...it just don't seem fair, that's all. I mean...we sat here for hours teasin the fishes with bait. The rest a the fishes must've been afraid, but that one was brave enough to swim up an try an catch what he'd been eyin all day, thinkin he was gonna get somethin real nice. But all he's gonna get is a hook in his cheek an a place on the grill. Just don't seem right, lettin him down like that after he tried so hard."

The fish twisted in Ennis's grasp, wanting to leap.

_One day up on Brokeback, they moved the sheep to the other side of a hill and then lolled in the high meadow late into the afternoon. Ennis perched on a granite outcropping, scanning the tree line for the coyote he'd spotted earlier. Beneath him, Jack leaned against the rock, holding a little black lamb in his lap while he worked burs out of her wool. Damn sheep had wandered off from the flock and ended up grazing in probably the thorniest patch of weeds on the mountain, collecting a coat-full of thorns just for a taste of something sweeter. Jack scratched behind her ears, released her, and watched her trot right back into the bramble, and Ennis couldn't restrain a chuckle at how much those two creatures had in common._

_Right before twilight, the coyote emerged at the edge of the woods. She stood tall for a female, but scrawny—probably hungry, Ennis said, enough room in her belly for a couple sheep. _

_Jack knelt with the rifle poised, waiting for her to clear the trees. "Shit," he finally hissed, just when Ennis was growing impatient. "She's got a pup."_

_Ennis squinted. Between the coyote's front legs, a young pup poked his nose out, sniffing the wind. "Don't matter if he gets away. He ain't even a match for one a the lambs. Probably ain't even weaned yet, won't last a week."_

_"Yeah," Jack agreed in a whisper, took aim again, and fired._

_Ennis watched the shot graze bark off the side of a pine twenty feet above. The pup ducked behind momma who huddled over him for a second and looked around before the two of them fled into the woods together. Some startled birds re-settled in the trees. Ennis gave a hearty shove to his companion. "Christ, Jack, you're the worst shot I ever seen. Let me do the shootin from now on." Jack stood and stretched his back, shrugged, unruffled, lazy grin. Ennis took the rifle but the coyotes were long gone. "They was what, seventy feet away? How in hell do ya miss that? An she was a big ol bitch too. Goddamn."_

_"Probably for the best," Jack said._

_"How ya figure that?"_

_"She had a pup. Ain't right leavin a orphan all on his own."_

_"Yeah, well, now he's goin a grow up an probably be big as her by the end a summer, eat half the sheep too. Goddamn worst shot I ever seen, Jack. Shit."_

_Back at camp, the embers of their fire glowed long into the night, warmth finding its way into the tent where Ennis slept pressed against Jack's chest. It must've been two or three o'clock when the yapping woke him. Damn. Stiff and sore, fuzzy with sleep and whiskey, Ennis disentangled himself from Jack and crawled to the tent flap and listened. For a moment, silence, embers popping, then the howling resumed, and with his ear to the flap he clearly distinguished two separate voices, one low and one high: the mom and her pup. He was too tired to get angry but mumbled a few curse words about Jack's abysmal aim, thought how he himself could've made that shot when he was a kid and wondered if Jack had really shot that eagle or just found the feather on the ground. Grabbing the rifle, he opened the flap, paused for a second and watched his breath rise. Big howl, little howl. How in hell could someone miss such a sure shot. And then Jack's earlier words swirled into his thoughts, about not leaving orphans, and Ennis realized Jack was referring to _him_ as much as to the pup, and he pictured that shot hitting halfway up the pine tree, and he closed the tent flap and crawled back into the bedroll and found that spot against Jack's chest where he fit just right, and in that moment he loved Jack so much there was nothing else._

_In the morning Ennis rode up early expecting to see half the sheep eaten, fuck-all he cared right then, hungover and near sleepwalking and wanting only the warmth of their tent, but the sheep were unscathed, grazing heedlessly, and there wasn't a coyote anywhere in sight for days. _

_Back at camp, Ennis found something bubbling over on the fire, Jack asleep in front of it with his hat low over his face, and their garbage foraged through, strewn across the ground, with two sets of paw prints—one big, one little—in the surrounding mud. Ennis wanted to be angry but could do no more than laugh. He nudged Jack's feet, knocking them off the rock they rested on. "The coyotes got into the trash while you was sleepin," he said, trying to sound stern through his smile. "Figure you get to clean it up, since they're your friends and all."_

_Jack pulled his hat down lower, stuck his feet back up on the rock by the fire, and mumbled: "Later. Anyhow, better'n them eatin the sheep." Beneath the brim of the hat, Ennis saw a sly smirk peeking through, teeth showing, and he thought how much Jack reminded him of one of those coyotes, maybe more the coyotes than the sheep after all, or maybe a bit of both of them, like that little black lamb—full of dreams and mischief and some kind of beautiful bad luck._

Ennis stared at the fish gasping in his hands; he didn't need to look up at Junior to know her expression. From the tackle box he pulled a pair of wire clippers and cut the barb off the hook so it slid easily out of the fish's cheek. Kneeling over the water, he lowered the fish beneath the ripples and let go. Junior's arms were around him within two seconds, her little girl lips kissing his cheek.

"Thank you, Daddy! Do ya think he'll be okay?"

Pursing his lips, Ennis reached for their can of bait, sighed, and dumped the worms into the water. "I think so. Fish are tough critters."

"Well that was silly!" Francie's shrill voice cut in. "Do you and Jack usually let the fish go after you catch them, and just eat cans of beans instead? I thought the whole point of fishing was to catch some dinner. I thought we were gonna catch a bunch of fish and build a nice fire and cook them. What are we gonna eat for dinner now?"

Ennis thought a moment, and smiled. An hour later they were sitting around a table at a pizza shop in town. Francie beamed and spoke of wedding plans and college plans; Ennis and Junior remained thoughtful but content. Halfway into her third slice, Francie paused. "Do you know what Junior's last name is gonna be? Smith. Junior Smith. Isn't that just so ordinary? And she won't even be 'Junior' anymore, since there isn't an Alma Smith, Sr." For that matter, Ennis thought, there wasn't even an Alma del Mar, Sr. now; Alma had changed her name the day she married Munroe. Francie continued: "I told her she shouldn't change it. Women don't have to any more, you know. This isn't the 1800's. Sometimes the husband even changes his name to his wife's, I've heard."

Francie kept talking but Ennis was off in a daydream, pondering which sounded better, Jack del Mar or Ennis Twist, repeating them in his head over and over, and deciding that the former sounded too abrupt and the latter had too many s's. He rolled his eyes at how much he felt like a schoolgirl, and tuned in to the conversation again but found the names echoing back now and then.

It was evening when they finally left. Ennis had eaten two slices of pizza and saved the rest for the girls, telling them they could eat it on the long drive home. They headed back for the trailer, stopping at a gas station store at Junior's request so she could pick up something she said she needed. Ennis offered to go in and buy it for her but she declined quickly as she hopped over Francie and out the door, her face twisted in an odd expression, half smile, half something else. He figured it was a womany thing, hoped with a white cold grip on the steering wheel it wasn't a pregnancy test already but figured he was the last one to judge. She returned with a paper bag rustling in her jacket pocket and said nothing about it, so Ennis didn't ask.

They pulled up at the trailer after dark, watched the cloud of dust rise and subside in the headlights' beam. "Guess ya better be gettin on the road," Ennis said shakily. He'd always hated goodbyes and had never been much good at them either. "Ya wanna come in, get some coffee for the drive?"

"No thanks, I'll stop back at the gas station," Junior replied, making an expression Ennis had no trouble recognizing.

"Ya tryin a say my coffee ain't no good?"

"Well, I wasn't gonna say it," she laughed.

Junior ran in to use the bathroom while Ennis and Francie said goodbye outside, Francie making him pinky swear that he'd come down to Riverton for the wedding and their trip to Boulder, Ennis staring for a long time at her tiny finger linked with his and choking up when she pulled it away. It was five minutes before Junior bounded down the steps—womany things, no doubt, Ennis decided—and two hugs and kisses later Ennis stood watching taillights as the dust settled around him.

He creaked up the steps and was almost through the door when a gust of wind blew from out toward the hills, bringing the scent of animals and straw and with it the howling of a coyote. Turning around, he sat down on the top stair and leaned against the door, gazing out at the near-full moon illuminating the vast plains. He didn't know why coyotes reminded him of Brokeback. He'd heard them before and he'd heard them after, but something in their chorus sung sweetly of that distant summer, their voices unexpected companionship in the mountain's dark solitude. Campfires and sheep and cans of beans; frigid mornings and Jack's hot skin simmering against his own; smoke and embers and quick gasped breaths swirling up to the imponderable expanse of stars. Memories of things that could never be again but that he ached for nonetheless. That was why, on warm nights such as this and sometimes on cold ones too, he lingered outside listening to their voices echo of mountains and stars and long-gone moments, and thought _sing me your tall tales, coyotes, sing the mountain back to me_, and waited up half the night until they just about did.

When he finally went inside, he sunk into the bed and might've been asleep within seconds except that his closing eyes caught a glimpse of shine on the coffee table, something stealing the moon, and he reached out a heavy hand to see what it was. The postcard. _The_ postcard, the one that had been in pieces a few hours earlier, now whole again. Ennis sat up abruptly and flicked on the light. Along the frayed edges, neat lines of tape encircled the card, connecting the four sections. Good tape too, so clear he could barely see it unless the light reflected, and flexible enough so he could fold the card up again to fit in his pocket. He traced one of the creases with his finger, the crease that ran through a certain word written on the back. L—ove. Love: all the fragments back in their places now, thanks to some tape from the gas station; everything complete. Through a smile, he released a long breath, wondered if it was really that simple...and thought maybe it could be, if he let it.


	4. Chapter 4

Over the next two months Ennis dedicated himself to work, getting in as many hours as he could, dark mornings and starry nights. He found that working so hard didn't leave him much time or energy to think about his plans for the future, which was a good thing because he couldn't back out of a plan if he hadn't made it in the first place. When exhaustion set in, a reminder folded neatly in his front pocket spurred him on. Every extra penny went into the coffee tin. He even stopped smoking and drinking—temporarily, he reassured himself, just until he could save enough money to...well, just until he could save some. He asked Stoutamire again for time off, explaining that he had family obligations in August, but wasn't surprised at his boss's adamant refusal. So a week into July he gave Stoutamire notice; the second week he drove out to Jed Miller's ranch to inquire about selling his horses. Miller's operation was booming so he bought the horses and saddles. And because he had always respected Ennis as a reliable worker, he relented and even bought the horse trailer that both men agreed was a heap, paying more than it was probably worth but less than Ennis wanted, saying what the hell, he could always use a spare. Ennis pocketed the money, said a tight-throated goodbye to his horses.

On a Wednesday in the second-to-last week of July, Ennis left work before sunset for the first time in months, went back to the trailer, and packed his scant belongings into his truck except the blanket on the bed and a pot for making coffee. He'd planned to sleep in late, knowing a long drive awaited him—a drive to a location he tried not to dwell on, fear and anticipation prickling through his body like cold water. But at three am he realized he'd done nothing but dwell on it most of the night, so he got up and made coffee, dropped the trailer key off with Stoutamire, picked up a map from the gas station Junior had gotten the tape from, and once on the highway finally allowed himself to think it: he was going to Texas; he was going to see Jack.

He stopped in Riverton on his way through and tiptoed up the steps of the dark-windowed house. In the mailbox he slipped a folded-up note for Junior saying he'd gone fishing, would call in case she needed anything for the wedding, and would see her next Sunday. And then it was him and the road. When possible he avoided the interstates and took the backroads instead, county routes and seldom-used highways. That path would lead him down into Colorado west of Boulder and Denver, through Santa Fe, and finally over into Texas. He intended to drive straight through, no sleep, and with his circuitous route and affinity for slow speeds, he calculated it would take him almost a day. So aside from getting gasoline, he only stopped a few times to fill up his thermos with coffee, enough so that he was shaking with it by the time he reached New Mexico, feet jiggling on the petals.

He didn't actually know if Jack was in Childress at the moment, or if he would still be there at whatever dark hour of the morning Ennis arrived. Jack went on business trips sometimes, so he could've been out of the state—farther north than Ennis even. Calling first would've cleared that up, but calling offered too many easy excuses to back out: Jack might've had other plans, might've said it wasn't a good time, or said come on down but his voice might've held just the slightest hint of apprehension. And then Ennis would've been back in Stoutamire's trailer in Signal, days wasted on a failing ranch, nights spent alone listening to the wind slap the loose aluminum panels and blow dust into the crevices. Better just to get in the truck and drive. He had ten days to figure out the rest before he had to be back in Riverton for the wedding. Even if Jack wasn't home right then, his selling trips didn't last that long; he and Ennis would eventually overlap.

A couple hours past Santa Fe the coffee wore off, but by then he didn't need it, anxiety and longing concentrated into two quivering hands clenching the steering wheel. On the seat beside him a barely-eaten bag of potato chips lie spilling crumbs. Ahead of him the highway stretched out languid across a wide valley, hills at the other end like the still form of some slumbering creature, moonlit specks of trees the only hint of distance in between. The truck was moving—engine grumbling, frame bumping on worn suspension, low front tire pulling a little to the right—but still there was a sensation of motionlessness. The same pinyon pine passed a dozen times, branches still, windless; the hills drew no closer, maybe receded: futility captured in the headlights' empty glare. He wondered if Jack had ever driven this highway too, or the last highway or any of the little nameless county roads, or if Jack had ever filled his tank at that gas station or taken the wrong exit at that interchange or pissed behind that sagebrush. Or if Jack had ever watched the stars emerge one by one over a pastel desert, watched the moon reflect in bluish slivers off each needle of that same pinyon, ever felt the pull of the sprawling road east and west and felt immobilized in the infinite valley in between. Or if Jack had stared heavy-eyed at the stars draining into the blanched dawn, last embers of a campfire they'd let smolder through the night. He wondered if Jack would really even want him to come to Texas at all.

_That's alright, Ennis, it's okay, it'll be okay, I'll see you in November, friend._ Through the valley, across the Texas border, dawn throwing long shadows, everything dusty yellow. A few months ago Jack would've been ecstatic, Jack who had made that drive countless times, once unexpected, and had stopped asking for anything in return. Jack, who must've always sped up to Wyoming, grinning and sleepless and wired from the waiting, only for Ennis to inevitably send him back home with nothing to go on, nothing except thread-thin highways protracted across the dust and sand, everything mute. And then there was that last trip in May, and Ennis thought maybe after so many miles a person wearies, no matter how many different routes they've driven over how many years. Jack wouldn't turn him away, but there were a lot of roads in between that and being glad Ennis was there.

Ennis squinted over the wheel at the sunrise. Two more hours, maybe three unless he found a bigger road; he'd been off the map for a while. He drove through a few one-street towns, passed some farms and ranches, fields of grazing animals or bobbing oil wells, the land cloaked in a methane fog. In the distance he thought he saw motion and the glint of headlights and windshields—a major highway, he hoped—and he headed straight east on a road he figured had to intersect. An hour later, the pavement had long since attenuated into a dirt farm road, no highway in sight, and the sun and the hours had drilled a pain behind his eyes. He glanced around for a farmhouse, a road sign, anything, and decided to drive five more minutes before turning back, but got no more than a hundred feet before something dashed across the road in front of the truck. He slammed one boot into the brake, the other slipping off the bare metal of the clutch. Gears ground, metal screeched on metal; the truck stalled, world obliterated by dust. When it settled, Ennis saw a coyote loping across the adjacent field. He turned the key and got the truck to start but couldn't make it stay in gear. Transmission blown. On the floor, potato chips floated in stale coffee. Ennis got out, took a dusty breath, grabbed a small backpack from behind the seat, and started walking along the fence line.

He'd been looking for a driveway, but when he realized he was walking along the back of a property, he slipped through the barbed wire and set out across the field. Eventually a barn came into view through the hazy morning, and next a one-story farmhouse painted pale yellow with white shutters and trim, not new but vivid as if rain had washed off all the dirt. A little garden surrounded the house, sunflowers and squash and strawberries, a couple fruit-laden trees, leafy green things. Ennis followed it around to the front walkway. There was the driveway, and beyond it another dirt farm road. A mailbox perched on the fence, flag up, and he read the name painted in neat cursive on the side: "Mrs. Cay Hoyt." He saw no livestock, no workers, no crops, but on the porch a wooden swing rocked itself in an unfelt breeze and two pairs of muddy boots lined up beside the screen door. The same breeze carried a sugary hint of something baking, and Ennis removed his hat and headed up the steps, thinking briefly of his childhood home and his mother and her apron full of baking flour. He pulled open the screen and knocked, took a step back, cleared his throat.

"Is that you, dear?" a woman's high voice called from inside, preceding careful footsteps. An old lady opened the door from within a cloud of baking sweetness that Ennis could almost taste. "Oh, a visitor! How lovely! Now what brings you out this way, young man?" Ennis couldn't discern the woman's age, but from her white hair and maze of wrinkles guessed her to be old enough to call him "young man" and mean it. Short and plump frame, hair coiled into two buns, little gold cross dutifully dangling around her neck, white apron tied over a pale blue dress, tea cup in one hand—she seemed stereotypical except for not wearing glasses and for a vibrant streak of ruddy brown hair holding out above her left temple.

"Uh, sorry to trouble ya, ma'am, but my truck broke down out on the road—" Ennis went to point but wasn't quite sure any more exactly which direction he'd come from. "—an uh, I was hopin if ya got a phone..."

"Oh, why certainly! Come in, come in. I was just about to make some tea," she said, pushing the screen open. Mrs. Cay Hoyt, Ennis supposed. He had only intended to ask her to make a call for him; haggard as he looked after driving all night, he hadn't expected to be let inside, and might've remained on the porch except for the beckoning scent of whatever was in the oven. "The telephone is right over there," she said, pointing to an antique on the far wall. "I'm afraid I haven't got a directory. Do you know anyone to call? You don't look like you're from around here."

"No, ma'am, I sure ain't," Ennis chuckled, then wondered where Mrs. Hoyt herself was from, her accent familiar but unplaceable. "Can ya tell me how far away is Childress?"

"Childress, is that where you're headed?"

"I hope so."

"Oh, it's not too far, an hour and a half, maybe two, past the lake and over the hills. Is there someone you can call there?"

"Yes ma'am, my uh...my brother," Ennis replied, cheeks flushing, certain she could sense the lie.

"Well, you take all the time you need. I'll just go and check on the pie."

"Thank you, ma'am, I appreciate it."

"Oh, call me Cay! It's short for Catherine. That was my mother's name, you know. Would you like some tea? I was going to make tea. I'll bring some out as soon as I check the pie," she said, tottering off toward the yellow glow of the kitchen.

Ennis picked up the phone, dialed the number he'd only ever called once before but still knew by heart, and as it rang he found his mind suddenly inert like the truck on that long highway between midnight and dawn. _Peach pie_, he thought, _smells like a peach pie_. Outside a wind chime hummed long slow notes, and in the kitchen pots and cups and saucers jingled against each other, promising sweetness.

He supposed it would've been easier had Jack answered the phone, but it was a woman's voice that finally picked up on the other end: "Randall, for the fifth time I told ya he is on his way—walkin out the door as we speak!"

Ennis cleared his throat, found no words, cleared it again. "Uh...is this...the Twist residence?"

Lureen gave a little gasp. "Oh, I am so sorry! I thought ya were my husband's fishin buddy."

_I thought I was too_, Ennis wanted to say. "Jack... I was callin...for Jack?" It came out like a question; partly it was.

"An who am I speakin to?" Lureen asked.

"Ennis—" he croaked, words sticking.

"Who?"

"Ennis del Mar."

"Alright, lemme see if I can catch him." She sounded put out, Ennis thought; she sounded about how he'd expected. The phone clanked against a hard surface but didn't muffle Lureen's shrill holler through the house: "Jack! Phone's for you!"

From farther away, Jack's voice barely cleared the receiver: "For Christ's sake, I'm on my way. Tell him if he keeps callin I ain't goin."

"It isn't Randall this time, it's—" Lureen picked up the phone. "What did ya say your name is again?"

"Ennis. Ennis del Mar."

"Oh, the other fishin buddy, from Wyomin. That's right. Are you goin with them too? Hold on a minute," she said, unconcerned, then yelled "It's Ennis del Mar." If Jack spoke, neither Ennis nor Lureen heard him. "Jack? Jack!" she called again. Finally footsteps approached, boots on a wooden floor, quick and light; it surged through Ennis's body, raw heat.

"Ennis? What's goin on?" Something about being in Texas made Jack's voice seem so close.

Before Ennis could respond, Lureen cut in, her voice tapering. "Ya better hurry up before Randall calls again. I swear that man is more impatient than a five year old. I told him the fish aren't goin anywhere, but..."

A door clicked closed. "Ennis? Everything okay?" Jack sounded worried.

Ennis nodded, realized its insufficiency. "Uh, yeah."

"Are your girls okay?"

"Yeah."

"Is Alma okay?" Worry blended into confusion into frustration.

"Yeah," Ennis repeated lamely.

"So...everyone's fine?"

"Well, yeah."

"Okay... I mean, not that I ain't glad ya called, but it's just—"

And then Ennis said what he hadn't wanted to say, what had been choking down all the other words and finally came bubbling up past them anyway. "Look, if ya got somewhere else ya wanna be, don't let me keep ya."

"Ennis..." Frustration always fizzled into weariness, heavy sigh. "It ain't like that. Ya don't get it. Ya don't—" A telephone rang a brusque interruption and Ennis recalled that Jack had two phone lines, one for home, one for business. From another room, Lureen shouted to Jack: it was Randall calling again, for real this time, wondering why Jack wasn't there yet. Another sigh flooded the receiver.

"I think I got the picture pretty good," Ennis said in Jack's silence, and found himself wondering which one of them—himself or Randall—had the number for the business line and which one the personal.

"No, Ennis, ya don't got the picture," Jack replied, regret sagging heavy in his words. "Shit, Randall?—he don't mean nothin to me. None a them meant nothin—Randall, LaShawn, Mexico—none a them."

"Jack, did ya hear me? Jack?" Lureen clamored, but he ignored her.

"They was just stand-ins for you, all them months alone," he told Ennis. "You like solitude. You like bein lonely. But I like bein warm at night. Thought if I tried hard enough, I could just about pretend... Christ, Ennis, that's all it ever meant—just placeholders, just somethin to pass the months til the next time I could see you."

Lureen shouted again, distracted, emotionless, empty volume in a distant room. "Jack? Pick up the other line, already, would ya? I got work to do."

"Hold on a minute," Jack yelled in reply, then turned back to Ennis, voice soft and supplicating: "Tell me ya don't want me to go. Tell me to stay here an talk—say it'd mean somethin to ya." Words flooded Ennis's mind but his lips cinched around them. He shut his eyes just as tight, buried his face between the yellow wallpaper and the worn wooden box of the telephone. "Say so, Ennis. Tell me not to go. Just three little words: 'don't go, Jack.' But ya can't say it, can ya. Can't never say nothin."

A door creaked open, no knock, and Lureen's voice sounded like it came from right over Jack's shoulder. "Didn't ya hear me? Randall's on the other line wonderin where ya are. Sounds like he's about to have a heart attack. Should I tell him you'll call him back in a minute?"

"Jack..." Ennis croaked. Jack was right—three little words. Always three little words that lost their way somewhere between Ennis's chest and his lips and twenty years later still hadn't made it out.

"Jack?" Lureen repeated.

He answered neither one of them, leaving a tense stillness—silence latent with everything unsaid, all the cold months of unspoken things, whisper of his own quick breaths blowing back from the receiver. Ennis touched his shirt pocket and thought of the mountain and the night sky and how when he stared long enough at the darkness between stars it eventually filled with more stars and more, layers of them, incomprehensible, light emerging gently from the deep. The spaces between things were always more complex than they seemed.

"Tell him I ain't goin," Jack finally said. Ennis exhaled, his posture crumpling against the wall.

"Well alright," Lureen sighed, "but he ain't gonna be happy about it. Call him back when you're off the phone, would ya, so he don't keep callin all day? Oh, and since ya ain't goin, would ya mind runnin over to the store an pick up somethin for dinner?"

"Sure thing," Jack said softly.

Ennis waited until Lureen's boot heels had clicked away on the wood floor. "Jack, I—"

"It's alright, Ennis. It's fine. Look...why're ya callin? I mean, why now, second time in twenty years?" He asked it as if not expecting an answer or not wanting one, voice passive, distant, all the years of feeling burnt out of it. Ennis wondered if the weariness was all that was left, and wished very much he could see Jack's expression right then: hunched over a desk, forehead resting in one palm, eyes downcast and perhaps even closed, lips neither smiling nor frowning but an arrow-straight line like a desert highway. Ennis didn't know if he had an answer to give anyway, or at least the words to say it.

"Uh, well...thing is, I drove..." In the kitchen, old Mrs. Hoyt scuttled around, a teapot whistled, an oven door squeaked open; the house brimmed with candied warmth, peaches releasing the scent of summertime. Ennis sucked it in through his mouth, tasted it, and for a second thought only of his childhood home. "I uh...well, my truck broke down."

"Well why didn't ya say so? How much is it goin a be? I can probably get a check in the mail today."

"I don't need money. Anyhow, it ain't at no repair shop, it's still right on the road where it broke down."

"Ya know what's wrong with it? Can ya fix it?"

"Hell no I can't fix it, the transmission's out. If it was somethin small, a belt or fluid or somethin, sure, maybe, but this? I don't even know if it can be fixed, truck's so old anyhow." Ennis was glad for something easier to talk about; between that and the aroma of peach pie, he felt the tightness in his chest and throat disengage.

"Either way, it'll cost to get it towed. How bout I send a blank check? I don't much like puttin one in the mail, but that way it'll cover—"

"I don't want ya to send me nothin—"

"Ya want me to drive up there?" Jack asked, sounding jaunty again, and Ennis pictured a new expression, deep dimples, eyes lucent. "I can leave right now, get there by the middle a the night, then in the mornin we can hitch up your truck an while it's gettin fixed—"

Jack sounded suddenly so enthusiastic that Ennis almost couldn't bear to interrupt him. "No, Jack, I uh...I ain't in Wyomin... I'm in Texas," he said, and found a smile creeping up the corners of his lips.

"You're what?" Jack asked as if he'd misheard.

"I'm in Texas. Bout a hour an a half from Childress."

"You're in Texas?" Jack asked so emphatically that Ennis guessed Lureen probably heard it from whatever room she'd retreated to.

"That's what I said."

"You're jokin with me."

"I ain't jokin," Ennis chuckled.

"What in the world are ya doin in Texas all the sudden?"

Difficult enough to explain to himself, never mind putting it into words out loud. He hadn't thought Jack would ask or care as long as Ennis was finally there, but then again he hadn't counted on interrupting Jack's trip with Randall... _Don't matter, Jack ain't goin. Said he ain't goin even before he knew where I was. Don't mean nothin. Don't mean nothin at all._ His smile drooped but he tried not to let the worry pleat into his brow, and tried to find words at least to say this one thing. "The girls came up to visit, end a May. Junior's gettin married next Sunday an Francie's goin off to college down in Boulder next fall. They're grown up now, goin off on their own. They don't need me there no more, not that I been much of a dad anyhow, even before me an Alma split up. So after the weddin an takin Francie down to Boulder...I dunno, Jack, there just ain't much keepin me there."

"Are you sayin..." Jack started, cautious.

"I dunno what I'm sayin, except Stoutamire's ranch was goin under so I quit, an I don't got a be back up for the weddin for nine days."

"So here ya are! I got a say, you're about the last person I expected to be callin or visitin. An geez, ya got some kind a timin."

Ennis glanced toward the kitchen, shifted uncomfortably. "Yeah, well, it's been a odd couple a days."

"Has been for me too, friend. An y'know I sure am glad ya caught me before I left," Jack said, heaviness in his voice all the apology offered or needed.

"Yeah, uh...look, I'm in this lady's livin room right now, so..."

"Huh? Where are ya?"

"Come on, Jack, pay attention here," Ennis joked, smile reclaiming its hold. "I told ya, my truck broke down, so I walked to the nearest house to call ya."

"Hey, this is a lot at once, alright? Anyhow, I figured you was at a gas station or a pay phone."

"Ain't a gas station around for miles, I doubt. I'm out in the middle a nowhere. I'm hopin Mrs. Hoyt can give ya directions—that is if you was thinkin about pickin me up or somethin."

"I dunno, ya heard Lureen—I got some important errands to run."

"Jack—" Almost laughing, Ennis turned away from the kitchen, lowered his voice into the phone. "Jack, get your ass out here already."

"Okay, okay, I'm leavin in a second. I'll speed the whole way."

"Don't speed, I'm fine. Might just put my head down an catch a couple winks anyhow."

"Alright. Put that lady on an hopefully I can figure out where you're at."


	5. Chapter 5

_A/N: For anyone following, I must warn you I write slowly and probably won't upload more than one chapter per week. I'm at work 12-14 hrs/day which leaves little time for the important stuff like writing fanfics :) But I am making gradual progress (and also working simultaneously on two sequels) so stay tuned! And a big thank you to everyone who has left reviews/PMs :)_

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><p>Mrs. Hoyt emerged from the kitchen right on cue, teacup in one hand, map in the other, making Ennis wonder if she'd been eavesdropping. He laughed at the idea, imagining her white hair buns flattened against the sunny wallpaper as her ears tried to absorb every word—and what she would've thought had she figured out the truth. He asked her for directions and handed Jack over to her, listening as she enumerated all the roads and turns between them, the highways leading to streets thinning to dirt tracks that wound between the hills and farms. When she was finished she hung up the phone; Ennis had wanted to say goodbye to Jack, but with Mrs. Hoyt in the room, probably best not to.<p>

"You're in luck!" Mrs. Hoyt proclaimed. "Jack knows exactly where we are. In fact, he said he'd been planning to drive up near the lake anyway. Isn't that funny?"

_Not especially_, Ennis thought, but smiled through it and said lightly: "I didn't know ya had lakes in Texas."

"Oh, we certainly do. Let me show you here on this map," she said, motioning for Ennis to follow her into the kitchen where she unfolded the map across the table. "It's a map of Amarillo but it has the surrounding areas on the back too. We're actually closer to Amarillo than to Childress, you know—quite a bit closer. Remember that, if you're going to get your truck towed. Plus, Amarillo's a bigger city so they'll be more likely to have what you're after." Mrs. Hoyt offered a cup of tea and they sat at the kitchen table while she pointed out features on the map: lakes and rivers, a couple state parks, all the places for camping and fishing. Ennis sipped the tea through gritted teeth. When a timer rang, Mrs. Hoyt pounced for the oven and returned with a six inch high pie clasped between two potholders. "You're in luck again! Just in time for pie. We'll let it cool for a little while on the sill, but it'll be ready long before Jack arrives."

She shuffled off with the pie, opening the window to scents of garden plants and flowers and morning and all of them mixed with that same sweetness. Between the aroma of peach pie, Mrs. Hoyt's mentions of luck, and Ennis's drowsiness in the warm kitchen, his thoughts drifted to a distant time, to his childhood home and his mother baking a pie on a summer evening:

_Ennis sniffed the air, wishing he could swallow it all up, thick like syrup. His mother wouldn't tell him what kind of pie was in the oven so he pretended he hadn't seen her come home from the neighbors' with a basket full of peaches. He wanted to stay in the kitchen with her, but the glint of sun on the water proved magnetic to a boy of six as he shooed flies out the window after dinner. Must've been ninety degrees outside, the kitchen boasting another five and maybe ten standing by the stove. With the corner of her apron, his mother smeared sweat from her temples, streaking baking flour in its place; his father slammed down a sixth empty bottle of ain't-cold-enough beer on the table, pretended he wasn't too drunk to read the newspaper. Ennis watched the river, glimmering streak of gold mined from the far pasture's dirt, and his legs started to run for it._

_"Goin swimmin, Momma," he yelled halfway out the screen door, flinging it wide until its one intact hinge croaked in that way rusty metal does just before it crumbles._

_"Boy!" his father called after him. A deep prickling cold in his spine jolted Ennis to a halt, screen door snapping back against his bare toes. That was his father's whoopin voice. He didn't know what he'd done to deserve it, but he stood static listening for the whir of the leather belt whipping through denim belt loops. It never came. "Boy, it's too late in the day for them dogs to be runnin loose. Close the far gate when ya go out it, an see to it the dogs are on this side of it. Gettin into God knows what out there, besides...come back covered in cow shit an mud, burrs all in their fur, damn mess..." The beer drowned his voice down to a murmur._

_Ennis didn't know if that gave him rights to leave, so he didn't move any more than restrained breaths and too-quick blinks until his Momma whooshed over in her floury apron and held the screen open for him, smiling in that way she smiled when something sweet was baking. "You shouldn't use the Lord's name in vain, Kyle," she said placidly to her husband; Ennis had already covered half the pasture. _

_When he reached the barbed-wire fence, he hadn't yet caught sight or sound of the dogs, or else he might've remembered to call them in for the evening. But as it was, he rushed through that gate like water over slick river stones, bare feet impervious to thorns and rocks and scorching dirt, drawn to that glittering shore. Evening was the best time, he knew: the sky of smelted gold pouring itself into the muddy water, alighting on the ripples, then brimming over the banks until all the dirt and fields and trees radiated with it. So gilded was the world within his river that Ennis didn't even notice a mountain lion stalk through the pines, one spot of sleek yellow against a landscape of it._

_He paddled around, laughed and splashed, floated through the crests of fire and sunset. The scent of peach pie still filled his nose and he considered what size of piece to take when he got back—medium if his father was still there, and huge if not. Scraggly pines sipped the last rays of daylight, glowed drunk with it, fell asleep into shadow. When Ennis turned toward the bank, the last remnants of light faced him straight on, two tiny green-gold suns within a furrowed brow: the mountain lion. Gasping, he inhaled half a breath of water, then hauled himself onto a rock in the middle of the river as he choked and spat, eyes never leaving the lion's glare. Mountain lions could swim, he recalled his father or maybe K.E. telling him, but just like a house cat they didn't like to—they needed a good reason. Ennis wondered if his meager body would be reason enough. He tried to lift his feet fully onto the rock but couldn't will himself to move. He tried to pray but the fragments of prayers Sunday school had scattered through his memory couldn't quite make it past his quivering lips. Even his heart seemed afraid to pump, water and breaths filling the long spaces between beats. And so he crouched, anesthetized._

_It was a waiting game, he knew. Most things were. Hold and wait, more still than the row of windless pines, more silent than the emerging stars. Something would give. Hold still long enough and something always wearied of the wait and either gave or broke. He'd learned that before he'd ever learned about luck. Luck: an illusory thing back then, no name for it, no voice except perhaps the far-off baying of coyotes, wind grazing the dry fields. In the distance behind him a coyote yipped and somewhere in the pasture a dog barked in reply, then more barking, another dog joining in, sounds converging from the darkness. Call it luck, or chance. Hell, call it stupidity for all he cared—it was the thing fluttering within him, the thing that transcended reason yet came to pass as though there had never been another plan: the voices of Ennis's two shepherds who Ennis, lured by the river, had forgotten to lock in the yard. The dogs neared until he could just distinguish two blurs of shadow, barking a racket but not daring to cross some invisible threshold between their territory and the cat's. They weren't large dogs; the lion could've taken on both of them at once and knew it just as well as the dogs did, but they kept him distracted for long enough. The cat pricked his hair up, fearsome ridge rising along his spine, cautious but not capitulating—_

_Until the gunshot. In one deafened second, the mountain lion ducked and bolted, gone through the pines before the echoes even stopped resounding. The dogs calmed. A lantern's glow advanced through the pasture. Ennis gave. His body slack, he slid into the river, supported only by the current tethering him against the bank. His father's footsteps approaching sounded like angry heartbeats. One hand grabbed his forearm, yanked him in a single unhindered motion onto the shore, discarded him there the way Kyle del Mar dropped rabbit carcasses on the ground after a hunt._

_"Thought the dogs cornered a coyote, all that howlin an barkin," he said, voice cold as the river but without the ripples. "Thought I told ya to put them dogs up."_

Ennis felt his head droop forward and he jerked his neck upright, blinking away the bleariness. Must've dozed off for a second. At the counter, Mrs. Hoyt was cutting two giant slices of pie onto peach-yellow plates. He took a lukewarm sip of tea and wondered how long he'd actually slept, and why he'd recalled that day from his childhood for probably the first time in a couple decades. He smirked thinking of it so many years later. He'd never gotten his piece of pie that night; his father sent him to bed without it, and Ennis shed more tears over the missed pie than the ordeal with the mountain lion. In retrospect he figured after that day he should've stopped listening to his father about things like closing gates and putting up dogs and men who deserved to die in ditches. But instead he shoved it all down inside to some silent place, listened to his father until the day the old man died—hadn't stopped listening when it came to some things. And thirty-three years later Ennis still regarded rules as sacrament, double-checked doors and gates, and sometimes felt like part of him had never made it off that rock in the river. Once in a while he let the rules slack a bit but they always haunted him, buzzed in his ear like a wasp, gripped his neck like a hard, callused hand. Almost always. Yet between the rule-following and the gate-checking, moments snuck in when he'd look up from that firm line and find the world around him glimmering as gold as that August day, and, if only briefly, shuck the rules as easily as shucking clothes before the creek. Like Thursday, when he'd woken up in Wyoming, left his job, packed the last of his belongings, and driven across half the country to visit someone who every rule he knew said he shouldn't love.

Mrs. Hoyt returned to the table, setting the larger of the two pieces of pie in front of Ennis. "Thank ya, ma'am, but I couldn't. I already imposed on ya enough," he said, though his mouth was watering.

"Oh, nonsense! I love visitors. Besides, it might be a while until you get a chance for a meal, so you go on and eat up." Fork poised above her slice of pie, she leaned forward, eyes intent, and watched Ennis like a creature stalking prey. He smiled; pie was serious business to old ladies with nothing but time on their hands, he supposed.

"Naw, Jack'll take care a me when he gets here. I don't need to be eatin up all your pie," Ennis objected, sticking his fork through the crust anyway.

"Well, I can't eat the whole thing by myself! Go ahead, and take a second piece if you'd like. It's a long drive to Amarillo."

"Childress, ma'am, an thank you," Ennis said, his mouth full of pie as soon as the last word was barely out. He pondered for a second who she lived with—whose boots were on the front porch and who she'd been expecting when Ennis had knocked on the door—and why they couldn't help her eat the pie. But he decided not to pry, and a couple bites later had forgotten about it anyway.

"Yes, Childress, that's right. Childress is even farther from here than Amarillo, you know," Mrs. Hoyt said, and Ennis nodded with a mouthful of peaches.

"Best pie I had since I was a kid," he said after the last bite, then wiped up the crumbs and syrup with his finger as soon as Mrs. Hoyt turned her back.

"Another piece, then?" she asked knowingly, and returned with the entire pie.

"Maybe just a little one," Ennis surrendered, deciding to eat this one more slowly, give his stomach a chance to catch up. "I'm real grateful for everything, can't thank ya enough. I think I'd still be walkin round in circles out there if I hadn't seen your place."

"You and your brother are so polite. Your mother should be proud. Do you know Jack even offered to pay me for the phone call? I told him not to worry about it, so he said in that case he'd pay for all the trouble he was certain you were causing!" Mrs. Hoyt laughed, high-pitched and mirthful, as she scooped an even more generous serving of pie onto his plate. "Mr. del Mar, let me ask you, do you believe in Fate? Do you believe everything happens for a reason?" she began after a moment, nibbling at the edges of her mostly uneaten slice. The sun slanting in through the window lit an auspicious sparkle in her crucifix necklace, and Ennis hoped it wasn't going to be one of _those_ lectures.

"Oh, I dunno. Sometimes, I guess," he replied equivocally, shoveled a forkful into his mouth.

"Well, I think the good Lord had a path laid out for all of us from the beginning. It may not be one we want or even understand, but I like to believe we all fit into his plan somehow." She smiled, sipped her tea, and Ennis wondered where and how he and Jack fit into anything except the solitude of the mountains and the brief campfire glow. Or maybe they didn't fit in but instead had slipped out of it, had ridden so high up the treeless slopes of Brokeback that whatever grand plan Mrs. Hoyt spoke of had proceeded without them and left them lingering on the outskirts of all of it for the last twenty years.

Mrs. Hoyt continued: "It can be difficult to think so, especially when things don't go the way we wish, or when we lose someone we care about. But you know, I think His purpose for us is far bigger than any one of us, and too complicated for our little minds to understand. That's why we can't take anything or anyone for granted, and why sometimes all we can do is to have hope and faith."

Feeling conflicted and a bit little-minded himself, Ennis could only nod. With Mrs. Hoyt being probably twice as old as him or more, he thought how many people she must've loved and lost in all her years, and he figured he didn't have much to offer her about the way the world worked. Hope and faith. He supposed that was all that had carried him down to Texas in the first place, all that kept him from turning around at every stop, every gas station, every interchange. All that had lasted him through twenty years.

Maybe he and Jack fit in with each other, if not with the rest of it.

"Oh my, look at the time!" Mrs. Hoyt said, though Ennis hadn't seen a clock anywhere in the house. "I wonder what's keeping your brother. Do you think he might be waiting for you by your truck? The directions would've taken him right past it."

"Could be. Or he might be tryin a fix it himself."

"Do you think you ought to wait for him out there? If you head out the driveway, turn right at the first crossroads, then right again at the next, you'll get back to your truck and you'll run into him either way, since that's the way he'll be driving. Here, take the map with you just in case. Oh, and how about another slice of pie? Maybe one for Jack too? Does he like peach pie?"

Ennis laughed. "Yeah, Jack has a sweet tooth alright." He recalled accidentally picking up Jack's coffee when they'd stopped at a gas station one time, taking one swallow and spitting it out on the floor of the truck for all the sugar Jack must've dumped in it, Jack laughing so hard he could barely drive.

"I'll wrap up a couple pieces to take with you. I can't eat the whole pie by myself, you know. A lady has to watch her figure. Besides, I planted that tree wanting a few peaches for pie every once in a while and now it just won't stop growing them! Sometimes I get in over my head. I'll have to make jam with the rest of them—I'm getting a little tired of pie, truth be told." Her voice trailed off into the kitchen and soon she returned with the map of Amarillo folded up on top of a foil package that couldn't have contained less than half the pie.

"Thank ya again, ma'am. At least lemme give ya a few bucks for usin your phone so long."

"Oh, don't be silly. I don't get as many visitors as I used to, so having some company for the morning is payment enough. Do say hello to Jack for me, though. He sounds like a nice friend." She opened the front door, her expression the worldly and kind one Ennis expected from old ladies, her smile bright with pearly teeth.

He thought of correcting her just to keep up appearances—Jack was supposed to be his brother, not his friend—but as he stepped onto the porch he found himself letting go of it, nodding quietly, face toward the bristly welcome mat, cheeks blushing around a shy smile. "Yes, ma'am, he is," Ennis said, and waved goodbye as he headed down the driveway.

When he turned right at the crossroads, the wind blew a hot breath of dust up from the fields. Ennis pulled his hat low over his eyes and shielded the foil package with his shirt. When the dust settled and the sky turned blue again, he felt the murk of exhaustion fading too as if awakening from an extended dream. Morning's lull lifted; senses returned. He suddenly smelled more than peach pie: dirt, straw, fertilizer, livestock, oil, his own sweat on his shirt. Meadowlarks whistled on the fence; in the distance, cows mooed, tractors rumbled. He patted the pie crooked between his wrist and elbow, still warm, and he was tempted to look over his shoulder toward Mrs. Cay Hoyt's house except for the distinct and admittedly ridiculous fear that it wouldn't be there. He chuckled, chided himself for such foolishness, but quickened his pace and kept his eyes straight ahead just the same.

By the second intersection the house would've been out of view behind a hill, and Ennis's preoccupation wandered back to his conversation with Jack. Where was Jack, anyway? Bumping along one of the dirt roads, had he changed his mind and turned off toward that lake where he'd been planning to meet Randall? Or maybe he'd given up on all of them and was on the interstate headed down to Mexico. Ennis stubbed his toe on a rock, jolting the rhythm out of his stride. No, Jack wouldn't leave him out there; he was on his way.

Still, Ennis couldn't help wondering about this Randall: what he looked like, how they'd met, how it had started; if he was a cowboy too, if he talked more than Ennis did, if he had no trouble saying words Jack wanted to hear; and did Jack even want to look at his face when they were making love, and did they make love at all or was it just mindless fucks, and which one of them was on top when they did it? Ennis didn't know which way he hoped it was with them. On Brokeback it was usually Jack down on his knees, the only way Ennis could face it then. He couldn't pinpoint when exactly things had changed, but sometime after their meeting four years later he'd realized he could do that with anyone, man or woman. The other way, though—that was something special, something he'd only ever let Jack do, no one else, never, only Jack. And so in the long biding months between their trips it grew to become something he needed, though he could put no more words to it than breaths and groans under the stars. He couldn't decide which way would be worse with Jack and Randall. Maybe both, or neither.

Any way, he supposed he didn't have much right to complain about Randall and Mexico and that rancher's wife Jack had mentioned... LaShawn?—was that the name he'd said on the phone, and what kind of name was LaShawn anyway?—couldn't even tell if it was a man or a woman. But either way, Ennis couldn't rightly give Jack any more grief over it, because on his own conscience there was the waitress at the Wolf Ears and the foreman's wife a couple years back, although that only lasted the one weekend, and that English teacher of Francie's back when he still lived in Riverton. He'd decided somehow they were different, that they didn't really count against him and Jack, perhaps because he hadn't been serious about any of them, or because they were women. But they were really no different than Randall. They were stand-ins too, company against the gusting snow and ice when he couldn't admit that it was only Jack's body he wanted beside him and that he should've said yes all those years ago.

Hope and faith, hope and faith. He figured it was time to release all of those other things, like letting go of a breath into the wind. Besides, he had a feeling things would be different from now on. In a way, they already were. He didn't know what they'd do after they met up on that road, where they'd go: to the mountains (did Texas have mountains?) or just back to Jack's place, what with Lureen so distracted over her work. He hadn't thought that far ahead—he'd tried _not_ to—but he wasn't worried, because Jack would come up with an idea. Jack always had ideas, and some of them were even good ones.

Through the haze, Jack's truck came into view a couple hundred yards ahead, and Ennis steadied the bundle in his arm and started jogging up the road, wishing his feet could move as fast as his heart. His own truck sat about the same distance in front of Jack's, and he wondered why Jack had parked so far away, but as he neared and had to slow down to tiptoe over a cattle guard he saw the problem. The right front side of the truck was jacked up a couple inches, the tire in pieces, rubber and metal splayed and dangling, a pump sitting beside irrelevantly. Flat tire and a busted transmission all within a tenth of a mile, what were the odds. He shook his head, snorted a facetious laugh. Jack was nowhere in sight, maybe off toward Ennis's truck, so Ennis reached through the open driver's window to set his belongings on the seat, then started up the road. At the tail end of Jack's truck he noticed a lug wrench discarded in the dry weeds. He easily could've pictured Jack getting fed up with the tire, chucking the wrench aside, kicking the truck for good measure, except that as Ennis rounded the truck bed to see how much progress Jack had made, he spotted a boot sticking up from the ditch at the side of the road, and then a blue-jeaned ankle, and then Jack's hat upside down and covered in dust. Ennis froze, wavered, watched the scene deluged with spots and then blackness, flailed his arms out and clutched the side of the truck before he fell. A second later when his vision cleared, he rushed forward.


	6. Chapter 6

Jack lay on his back down the slope of the ditch, arms perpendicular, one leg sticking straight out, the other bent awkwardly at the knee beneath it. Blood coated the front of his shirt, slathered his face in dirt-encrusted splotches. A gash tore through the bridge of his nose, exposing bone and cartilage, and trails of blood from it crossed his forehead and ebbed into the disheveled curls of his hair. His head pointed straight up, and had his eyes been open he would've been watching the cumulus amble on their way through the vast afternoon.

Ennis dropped to his knees, shouted Jack's name, put his hand under Jack's nose but felt no breath, then panicked internally, while on the outside just stalled. He'd seen ranch hands get thrown, trampled, kicked; he'd seen bar fights that turned out even worse. Finally all he could think to do was grab Jack under his arms, circle around, and drag him laboriously up the slope. Ennis's boots dug into the embankment and slid downward, losing a step for every two he took, and Jack outweighed him by twenty pounds, but inch by inch he managed to climb out of the ditch and lean Jack up against the side of the truck. Jack's neck slouched forward and Ennis lifted it, sitting down beside him in the dirt. Holding Jack's chin, he slapped his face lightly, shouted to him a few more times, voice ragged, wake up, Jack, please, ya got a wake up, come on. He checked for breath again but felt none, put his ear to Jack's chest and waited. His own breath shallowed, quick with tears. Only his own heart thumping echoed in his ear; beyond that, silence. From where he sat he wrapped his arms around tight and leaned into the embrace, letting Jack's head slump over his shoulder, hot blood pooling where their bodies met, and he listened to the wind whistle down the miles of dirt road and through the truck's underside and rustle in the dry summer grass, and he thought how until that moment he'd never truly known desolation.

If he'd called five minutes later, he wondered if Jack might've made it out the door. Jack would've been off who-knows-where with Randall by then, but Ennis wouldn't have cared if Jack was with Randall or LaShawn or down in Mexico as long as he was safe. It wouldn't have meant any more than seconds ticked past on the clock, like Jack had said, and eventually November would've blown in, crisp and golden, and they would've ridden up through the snow-crowned peaks and bulwark of pines and lain in the campfire's lambent ring and watched the autumn night one by one reveal its stars. Ennis burrowed his face into a handful of Jack's shirt, whispered a few little words lost to the wind, flux of tears dousing the bloody denim, red stain diffusing outward. On the barbed wire fence, two crows landed, their caws pervading the dry, mourning wind.

Some forgotten years ago, they lazed in a summer meadow lush with grasses and wildflowers, Ennis under dappled shadows, Jack soaking up the afternoon. On the bowing branches of a birch, their clothes hung drying, dripping the muddy water of a creek brimmed with snow melt. Ennis remembered fingers stroking hair, skin pressed to sun-warmed skin, hush of breaths beneath his head, drowsy procession of heartbeats. There was no end to it, no beginning. There was no hiking up to the meadow or coming down from it, no waking, no sleeping, no campfire that night, no stale pot of coffee in the morning, no taut-drawn drive into the mountains, no tear-blurred goodbye—a glimpse of a memory somehow apart from the succession of days. Why did Jack need any more? They had days like that, days encompassing everything, an afternoon that sprawled into its own little infinity untouchable by time. Why dream of more when, Ennis knew, dreaming was always punished?

The crows cawed and flew. A hot breath tickled the back of Ennis's neck and he strained to sit upright, lifting the drooping weight of Jack's body as he rose. "Jack?" he cried, frenzied, peering into the slit of eyes visible through dark quivering lashes. In response, Jack coughed into his face, splattering a pink mist of blood and saliva. Ennis cupped his hand around Jack's cheek, lost the image of his face in a tide of tears, relief flowing through him warm like sunshine. He didn't want to let go but knew he had to. Carefully he leaned Jack against the truck and jumped to his feet. For a moment he paced frantic circles like a caged animal—quicker to run back to Mrs. Hoyt's place? or was there another farmhouse around, or anyone working in the fields? and would he find them in time? As he turned past the truck, the silver glitter of tinfoil drew his attention and he remembered his belongings laid on the seat, the peach pie and behind it the map of Amarillo. Reaching through the window, he pulled out the map and found the little road they were on that Mrs. Hoyt had pointed out, and he traced the road in a straight line to the highway, highway to the interstate, and, on the other side of the map, the detail of Amarillo, he followed the interstate into town right past a blue square labeled in bold capital letters: "hospital." He scrutinized the map just long enough to memorize the route, then stared up the road at his truck. The tires were almost the same size.

A few minutes later Ennis was running back down the road rolling his left front tire along ahead of him. It turned out to be a little smaller than Jack's tires but it would suffice long enough to get them to the hospital. As he tightened the lug nuts he hoped it wouldn't mess up the truck much, but decided Jack wouldn't be upset for long and would pretty quickly see the humor in it or the irony at least and would laugh about it when telling the story years later. Once the tire was secure, he tried to gently lift Jack into the passenger seat but quickly abandoned his tenderness in favor of getting Jack's 170 pounds of pendulous weight into the truck at all. And then Ennis propped up Jack's head with a sweatshirt against the window and clicked both their seat belts—not his usual habit, but today there was no room for any more risks. The engine turned over like a breeze and he sighed in relief, pulled out around the burst tire, and sped off faster than he'd driven the entire way from Wyoming.

The farm road met the highway and Ennis shifted into fifth gear, glanced in the rearview and saw blue sky for the first time, the truck's comet tail of dirt left behind to fade across the pastures. The wind billowing in through the window had a lonely cry so he started talking to Jack, telling him about the drive down to Texas and how the desert had a way of stretching out the highways until they filled the night; about Stoutamire's face when he'd given him notice; about his fishing day with the girls and Junior's wedding and Francie's plans for college; about peculiar old Mrs. Hoyt and her teeming garden that grew the best peach pie in the world, and how the only thing Ennis missed about marriage was having someone to bake for him, which Alma had never done much of anyway and by the sound of it neither had Lureen; and about how maybe Jack could drive back up to Wyoming with him for the wedding and afterward they could go up to the mountains like they'd first planned for August before Stoutamire had told Ennis he'd have to run the baler, and how as soon as their fishing trips were over he missed the mountains and the campfires and their tent and the stars and thought about them every day until the next trip and lately hadn't been thinking about much else at all. Jack offered no response except sporadic murmurs, guttural and inarticulate. At first his eyes remained open a sliver, pupils dilated, seeing nothing, but fell closed by the time Ennis screeched to a stop by the hospital's emergency room.

Nurses pulled a patient from an ambulance parked in front of the truck. Ennis hopped out, ran around and opened Jack's door, might've yelled to the nurses, might not have, couldn't really focus on much more than the blood that had drenched the sweatshirt under Jack's head. But soon another bevy of nurses rushed out with a stretcher and clustered around Jack and lifted him onto it. Ennis followed them back inside as far as he could go until a nurse blocked his path and was telling him he wasn't allowed in there and to go move the truck and stay in the waiting room and some other words he half-heard as he watched the swinging double doors engulf the stretcher. His last glimpse of Jack was the dusty, worn soles of two boots lying askew.

* * *

><p>"Sir, what's your relation to the patient?" a young frizzy-haired nurse asked meekly in the waiting room, a clipboard full of papers clenched to her nervous chest. Ennis's face remained buried in his folded arms atop his knees. "Sir? If ya could maybe... I just need ya to fill out... I mean, for our records... Sir?" A hand found Ennis's shoulder. Too delicate to be Jack's touch. He lifted his head anyway. "I can come back if ya need some time," she said, eyebrows halfway up her forehead.<p>

Ennis shook his head, reached for the clipboard and pen, and squinted at the forms. The lie rolled out easier the second time. "He's my brother," he said as he started to write. Name: Jonathan C. Twist, Jr. Age: 39. Now what in fuck did the C stand for again?

The nurse leaned toward Ennis, her voice quavering. "Do ya know what happened? I mean, was it a accident at work, a car crash...? It'd help the doctor."

Somewhere in the weeds on the side of that farm road, a lug wrench lay cast aside in the dirt. He wished he'd picked it up or at least looked at it more closely, but of course by the time he realized it mattered he had more pressing concerns. Or was it even the wrench at all? There was that flat too, pieces of tire exploded everywhere, red-splashed rim on the ground below. Jack's face was too bloody to see enough details to know. Ennis shook his head, told her as much about the accident as he could, eyes tracing his scrawl on the hospital forms. Date of birth: March 13, 1944. Sex: male. Marital status:—

"The doctor said your brother's wearin a weddin ring. Does his wife know about the accident?" Shit. Lureen. And Jack's parents too, though he didn't know if they even had a phone. Ennis's expression must've revealed his answer. "If ya need to call her, or anyone else, there's a phone right over here, no charge." Was it that bad that the doctor had sent her to try to reach the wife? Ennis glanced at the name tag pinned in a perfectly straight line above her heart. Dottie. She couldn't have been much over twenty and reminded him of Junior, shy and thoughtful, burdened too much for her age. He felt a bit sorry for her as he handed her back the incomplete papers.

As he listened to the phone's empty ring in his ear, Ennis pictured Lureen and her adding machine and a desk bordered with neat stacks of papers. Behind him a clock ticked and he wondered if she even noticed Jack's absence all day or if she'd only realize at dinnertime when he didn't return with the groceries. She answered with a preoccupied hello; home line after all, Ennis thought, chest pinching up. He leaned his forehead against the unmitigated white wall.

"Is this Lureen?" he asked.

"Yes, who is this?"

"Ennis—"

"Who?"

"Ennis del Mar."

She paused, ruffled papers, slapped a pen down on the desktop, finally conceding her attention. "Jack still hasn't picked ya up? Well I don't know where he coulda gone. I swear he left right after he hung up. Ya want me to call ya a cab? Jack'll figure it out—if he ever decides to head over there."

"Jack's in the hospital," Ennis said. He hadn't intended to be so blunt, but might as well get it over with.

"What? What did ya say?" Lureen's little Texas drawl always sounded so inconvenienced. He wanted to scream at her.

"There was a accident...or somethin. We're at the emergency room in Amarillo."

"But...it's just somethin little...like back in the rodeo, right?" Finally it worked itself into her voice with a tiny waver, first sign of a beating heart. Ennis guessed he seemed the same way to Jack, who must've liked the thrill of the chase.

"I'm still waitin a hear," Ennis said. He looked toward the double doors that lie still on their hinges, windows veiled by the anemic reflection of fluorescent lights. At the nurses' station, Dottie scribbled on a clipboard, concern round in her eyes.

"What...what happened...to Jack?" Lureen's stilted question came in quick segments, easier to control.

Ennis touched the stain on his shirt, Jack's blood still sticky-wet, metallic thickness saturating the air. He saw Jack's face, bruises and exposed bone and mouthfuls of blood, and the lug wrench off in the weeds, red speckled, and the tire rim glinting red too, and the cloudless sky and that dirt road carrying on and on. "I dunno," he answered brusquely, then grunted out "somethin with the truck." Thrill of the chase didn't half cover it. Between the two of them, Jack must've liked banging his head against a wall.

He told her where they were—Amarillo? she asked twice, pronouncing it differently than he had—and she said she'd be there soon. "Ya want me a pick ya up or somethin?" Ennis cringed as he asked. Five more hours of driving—half of that barely talking to Lureen—was about the last thing he wanted, but there was nothing else he could do for Jack now so he owed it to him to at least take care of his wife. To his relief she said no thank you, that her mother was coming over anyway and would go with her. He didn't even know if the truck could've made it five hours on that mismatched tire.

Ennis reclaimed his seat in front of the nurses' station and watched them all skittering about—white uniforms with clogs, clipboards, stethoscopes, pretty names etched in blue on white tags, hair escaping from tightly coiled buns—then leaned forward over his knees again and closed his eyes, face sheltered between his blood-daubed sleeves. He awoke two hours later to Lureen's unmistakable voice, each word poised and discrete. "Excuse me, I'm tryin to find my husband, Jack Twist. I was told he was here." Ennis couldn't make himself lift his head.

"Yes, he's here, ma'am," a nurse told her. "The doctor's in with him now, so if you'd like to take a seat, I'll let her know you're waiting. Mr. Twist's brother is right over there."

"I didn't know Jack had a brother. It's a shame enough we still haven't met his folks," Mrs. Newsome said to Lureen as the clacking of their boot heels approached. Ennis figured that was his cue and hauled himself upright. Neither one of them was quite what he expected.

Jack had a family photo in his wallet and in it Lureen was rosy-cheeked and had long brown hair in ribboned pigtails beneath a red cowboy hat. Bobby, no more than three, wore a matching hat and balanced on her knee. Now Lureen's hair was what they called platinum, which as far as Ennis could tell meant one tiny shade away from the hospital's blanched walls. The same pallor veiled her face except in the too-perfect lines of makeup. Dark-haired Mrs. Newsome in her designer jeans and Lucchese boots didn't look old enough to be the mother, or perhaps Lureen looked too old to be her daughter, Ennis couldn't decide which.

"Ennis del Mar?" Lureen asked him, trying to force a smile, failing. Ennis nodded. "Good to meet ya. Thank ya for bringin Jack here." A crease in her brow deepened almost imperceptibly.

Mrs. Newsome cut in. "Jack never once mentioned a brother," she informed him categorically. No mystery where Lureen had gotten it from, then.

"Momma, Jack doesn't have a brother. This is his fishin friend from Wyomin. Ya know how hospitals are—they don't let ya stay if ya aren't family."

"Nice to meet ya," Ennis muttered.

"I knew he didn't have a brother," Mrs. Newsome said dismissively, surveying him in a blink: worn out soles, dirty clothes, desperate for a shave, all of him combined worth less than her left boot. Her slick blue eyes said it all, said _Look, Lureen—your Daddy was right. Look what kind of company your husband keeps_. Ennis figured it would've served her right to shake her hand with one of his own that was covered in dirt and blood and grease.

A doctor walked out through the swinging doors, heading toward them. Though Lureen's expression never lost its dignity, Ennis could see her throat clench, her shoulders stiffen, one pink-painted nail dig into her thumb until it left a mark, and he guessed between the three of them Mrs. Newsome was the only one breathing. Traumatic brain injury, the doctor said, resulting from an impact to his face. Pneumothorax due to two cracked ribs. A broken nose, a lot of blood lost, a chipped front tooth, and a hairline fracture to the jaw. Jack had regained consciousness but they'd knocked him out again for surgery. They were just finishing stitching him up and couldn't let anyone in to see him quite yet. He was still in serious condition, the doctor said, Jack's blood marring her blue uniform. She retreated back through the double doors and Ennis and Lureen stood staring blankly after her. Finally, Ennis said the only thing he could think about coherently, not speaking to either woman in particular, watching reflections sway in the windows. "Jack's truck'll need a new tire. I put one a mine on to get here but it ain't big enough. He ain't goin a be happy if it messed up his truck."

"Don't be silly," Lureen said. "Ya saved his life."

"My fault he was out there in the first place."

"I've been after him to get that tire fixed for a week now. It was bound to happen sooner or later. I'm just glad he wasn't out there alone," she said, sounding less glad than indifferent. Ennis couldn't tell if she even meant it or just lied to placate him. The whole exchange felt contrived.

It was Mrs. Newsome who sounded pacified, patting her daughter on the shoulder. "Sittin around here makes me feel so useless. Your daddy knew plenty of folks in Amarillo—why don't I go and see about gettin the truck fixed up? That's probably the best thing I can do for Jack right now."

Ennis sat back in the same chair, expecting warmth from his previous tenure there but finding only the air conditioning's artificial chill. He pushed down the bunched up sleeves of his flannel shirt, fingers pausing over the stiff patches of dry blood. A subdued shiver rolled through him like distant thunder. Who knew Texas would be cold. Across the waiting room, Lureen pressed the telephone to one ear and her fingers to the other and talked as she paced in brisk little lines. Twice she stretched over to the nurses' station and jotted notes on a scrap of paper, then ferreted through her purse for a datebook, then motioned for a nurse to hand her a clipboard. Ennis couldn't hear her but watched her mouth snap out words. Piece of work. Goddamn piece of work. He leaned over and burrowed his head into his arms again and wished very much he could wake up back in Stoutamire's dingy trailer in Signal.

Voices buzzed, heels clicked out a dozen separate paths through the halls. "Mr. del Mar?" Lureen drawled, in front of him unexpectedly. Awareness rose through him but he kept his eyes shut, not wanting her to be there when he opened them. A hand grazed his shoulder and he craned his head up, focused halfway between eyebrow pencil and blush, and thought of all the things he shouldn't say to her. "I'm sorry, I didn't know ya were sleepin," she said, halfway between apologetic and put out.

They held the stare for a second before he dropped his head down again. He didn't need to see her rigid lines of makeup, already knew everything he ever cared to know about her. How had Jack ended up with this woman. "S'okay. Just restin my eyes," he mumbled into his sleeve, not wanting to be harsh with her, not having it in him to be friendly either. He felt a sudden density beside him and knew Lureen had sat down—no movement, no warmth, only the thickness of two bodies occupying the same space. She sucked in air as if to speak but halted and gave up in a sigh; Ennis closed his eyes, thought of mountains. How had Jack ended up with either one of them.


	7. Chapter 7

"Sir?... Sir?" Dottie mewed close to Ennis's ear, and he looked up. Lureen was gone, probably attached to a phone cord somewhere. He couldn't tell whether he'd been asleep or awake. The nurse's daughterly face came into focus. "Sir, have ya ever given blood before?"

"Not on purpose," Ennis said, and she smiled cutely.

"Do ya know what type ya are?" she asked.

"What type a what?"

"Your blood type. It needs to match your brother's."

Ennis rose, a head taller than the girl, and peered past her toward the double doors but only saw his own gawking reflection. "What...what's goin on?"

She fiddled with a retractable pen, toggling the tip. "Well...the doctor was workin on Jack an his nose started bleedin again, really gushin. She got it stopped now, he's okay, but if it starts up again he'll need blood, an... See, Jack's type O. They call that the 'universal donor.' That means he can give blood to anyone, but he can only get it from other type O's. It always goes fast, an... well..." She flicked a furtive glance left and right, lowered her voice. "The hospital's sorta havin a blood shortage right now."

Ennis rolled up his sleeve, scanned the faces in the waiting room and wondered how much blood was pumping between them all and why the doctors weren't out there with needles yet. "Hell, just take my blood. Here," he said, shoving his bare arm forward.

"We gotta test ya first to see if ya match. Since you're brothers, it's more likely," Dottie said and didn't notice him flinch.

The needle looked half the size of a pencil as Dottie plunged it—again—through the skin in Ennis's forearm. She'd convinced him to donate a pint anyway so it'd be ready sooner in case Jack needed it. He scribbled left-handedly across a couple forms, with his right hand squeezed the towel the nurse had given him, and watched the blood seep through the tube slower than it had flowed from Jack out on that dirt road. He didn't much like the thought of some stranger's blood going into Jack anyhow.

"You've got itty-bitty veins! I couldn't hardly see em," Dottie announced. "Sorry I had to stick ya so many times, but it's flowin good now. Just a matter of findin the right one, s'all." She taped some gauze over the two holes on his left arm. "Jack was easy. He's got big ol veins and they weren't hidin like yours are."

"So, do we match?" He pumped his fist around the towel.

"We gotta get the blood out before we can tell. Either way, you're doin a good thing here."

A pint later, Dottie offered him pretzels and orange juice but instead he crammed down another slice of Mrs. Hoyt's peach pie, which tasted unforeseeably fresh-baked after so many hours in his bag. He resealed the pie and tucked it in above the coffee can, which jingled with coins when he nudged it, and a second later he was thinking heck with it and unwrapping the pie and finishing it off. Back in the waiting room, he saw Lureen's blond head adhered to the phone again. Without a glance or a pause, he strode past her to the same chair in the corner and thought a few of those things he wouldn't say to her.

"Oh, I gotta go... Alright, thank you, bye," Lureen said into the receiver, then hurried after Ennis. "Mr. del Mar? Ya don't happen to know Jack's folks' number, do ya?"

"No ma'am," he replied curtly.

She sat down beside him and leaned forward. Her cheeks puffed out with a slow exhale. "What a mess," she said straight ahead. "My mother took care of the truck. They said it's fine, no damage. She's goin home in case Bobby calls there. I've been tryin to reach him for hours, musta left five messages with his roommate. Anyway, at least I finally got LaShawn on the phone. Ya know, a normal day?—she's over at the house half the time or callin ten times an hour, her an Randall both. But today? when I actually need one of em? Nowhere to be found." She sighed again, swept a puff of bangs behind her ear, and rolled her eyes which Ennis noticed were a slight shade pinker than they'd been earlier. Not business calls after all, then. Ennis swallowed those words he'd been thinking, felt them catch part way down.

"Anyway, LaShawn said Randall finally got home so she said they'd look through Jack's office, try an find that phone number," Lureen continued as if Ennis knew these people or wanted to. "Information has no record of it. Bobby knows but he's either out or just not callin back... Maybe I oughta leave another message an tell him exactly what's goin on. Not really the kind of thing I want him to hear in a message though... Shit." The curse stuck out sharp and breathy from her usual composed drawl.

Ennis turned toward her and watched a crease fold itself into her brow like a crack in a windshield spreading too fast in just the direction you don't want it to go. He swallowed again and cleared his throat. "Uh...it's 'Ennis,'" he told her.

"What?" she asked distractedly.

"Ya don't hafta call me 'Mr. del Mar.'"

She breathed a small laugh. "Maybe I oughta call ya 'Mr. Twist' since you're Jack's brother now."

Ennis was about to apologize for the lie but Dottie trotted over. "Mrs. Twist, there's a phone call for ya."

"Please let it be Bobby," Lureen said to herself, and Ennis wondered who had sounded more weary—Jack when he first answered the phone that morning, or Lureen with that deepening furrow hurrying to answer it now.

Lureen had her back to Ennis while she spoke on the phone, but he saw her hand move off her other ear and slide over across her forehead and then down the bridge of her nose. He couldn't hear her talking but a moment later heard the dull ding of the receiver clapping down a touch too hard. She stood in front of it for a few seconds, swept her bangs back into place, and took a breath Ennis could see rise and fall in her shoulders. "You uh...get a hold a your boy?" he asked, obligated to say something to her.

"No, that was just Randall lettin me know he can't find the number. I dunno what to do about Bobby. The first time I tried callin him, his roommate said he wasn't sure if he left yet—he was goin campin this weekend with his friends. Last time I called, the roommate said he left a note but Bobby still hadn't been back. Looks like he musta gone already, left this mornin I guess."

Ennis nodded, considered it, then paused. "Roommate?"

"Yeah, Jack said we oughta try an get him his own room, offer to pay more, but those are the rules—everyone has to share, no exceptions." Ennis didn't know where to start asking, but his blank expression said it for him. "Didn't Jack tell ya about Bobby goin to school? That's all he's been talkin about the last two months." Lureen said.

"I ain't got a phone. Last time I talked to Jack—fore this mornin—was when he was up there in May." _When I told him I'd kill him for talkin about Mexico_, Ennis thought, and felt it rotting inside him.

Lureen nodded sympathetically at the mention of the phone; Ennis figured the ring on her finger could've paid his phone bill until he was eighty. "Oh, well, it was right after that. He was goin on about somethin or other the night he got back, said he'd been thinkin the whole way home. Next mornin he closed himself up in his office talkin on the phone all day. I wondered what he was up to. Turns out he found a school way out in California, a private boardin school with a program for kids with learnin problems. They talked to Bobby an sent him an application or somethin through overnight mail, said if he came out for summer school they thought he could get caught up to where he oughta be so he wouldn't even have to get held back a grade. Two days later he was on a plane. Turns out, they said—same as Jack kept tellin me—Bobby's dyslexic, but he's doin really well out there. His midterm grades came this week an they're all A's and B's. Jack's so proud of him... Ya know, I'm hopin..." she began, sighed, leaned her head against the wall behind. "I know Bobby'd wanna come home, but I'm hopin he stays gone on that campin trip long enough so by time he calls Jack'll be well enough to talk to him himself. He can't afford to miss school or get all distracted worryin about this... Ya got any kids?"

Ennis only nodded in response. He felt like she should've known this, that Ennis del Mar the Wyoming fishing buddy has two daughters named Junior and Francie and one was born just two weeks apart from Bobby. She should've known this already because he knew a hundred little things about her that Jack had told him, so Jack _should've_ told her all about him too. Or maybe Jack had told her but she hadn't ever listened. Either way, Ennis felt a bit disregarded. He couldn't muster the desire to talk to her now, be friendly, get to know her better, because what did it matter? He didn't know what was going to happen but he doubted he'd ever see her again after this. They weren't exactly in the same circles, after all, and in two decades she hadn't cared enough to remember his name. Maybe he'd been wrong about a couple things, but it wasn't as though they could ever be friends. It would've been artificial anyway, with this thing looming between them. If she was going to make him talk, he considered telling her the truth—how he and Jack hadn't actually fished in years.

Lureen kept speaking, Ennis wasn't sure if to him. "I probably shoulda waited to call Bobby, except by the time I thought about it I'd already left the message for him. Jack'll be so mad at himself if this gets in the way of Bobby's schoolwork. He was dancin all around the house like a fool when that report card came. Ya shoulda seen his face," she said, pink corners of her lips upturning for something far past the hospital's spotless white walls. In her eyes Ennis thought he could see Jack's face then, rosy and beaming, and by the time he looked away, something in Lureen's own face had softened. It was like that postcard in his pocket, he decided, feeling his heart beat against it: crisp edges gradually wearing down. He hadn't wanted to see that in Lureen. He'd wanted to keep her edges intact, nothing blurring over into unmapped territory; everything in its place, simpler that way. But nothing with them was so neatly fenced in and maybe didn't need to be, and so he pictured Jack skipping around with Bobby's grade report, laughing and howling, dimples filling up his cheeks...and pictured Lureen looking up at him from her adding machine and smiling back.

"I got two girls," Ennis said. "Francie's just a couple a weeks younger'n Bobby." He fished his wallet from his pocket for the old school photos. Lureen had a few of Bobby stashed in her purse. They got to talking after all.

In between watching every doctor and nurse who bustled through the waiting room, they traded stories about their children on and off. Lureen said she'd been preparing to hand over the family business to Bobby some day, but now that he was all educated he was set on becoming an artist. Ennis told her how Francie wanted to be something different every day. She'd be the first in his and Alma's family combined to go to college, and Junior was the first on his side to graduate high school. Neither of them much cared if their children became artists or librarians or doctors so long as they got farther than their parents had.

"Did ya ever think about goin to college?" Lureen asked.

"I thought about a lot a things but I didn't figure I'd do much more'n bein a ranch hand." He hadn't meant it to sound disparaging, and shifted away the focus. "So...you uh...study business or somethin?"

"What makes ya think I went to college?" she sort of laughed.

"I just...assumed," he said, shrugging, and thought how maybe he ought to stop.

"Well, I sure did study business, but not at any school. School probably would've been easier'n my Daddy though." Her older sister Louanna was the one who went off to college, Lureen explained. Their father had expected Louanna to learn the business but she wanted to be a teacher, and she won out in the end even though it clearly disappointed L.D. He grumped about disloyalty and abandonment for a while before deeming his second daughter an acceptable replacement. Lureen had wanted to go to college too, wanted to be a veterinarian same as Francie had for a couple days, but someone had to stay home and work and make Daddy proud. That was what she'd sought above everything else—making him proud, being his perfect daughter, having him smile at her like when she was a little girl in pigtails and a pink dress and she hadn't yet done wrong in his eyes.

Ennis hadn't considered it before, as much as Jack bitched about L.D. Newsome, but decided Lureen's father sounded not too different from Jack's father or Ennis's own. Did it, Ennis asked her, did it ever make him proud?

"Well, money made him proud. An I made money," she replied, her voice as bleak as the walls.

Lureen hadn't meant to seem so discontented either. She tried to steer them back to their children, happy tales, first words and birthdays, but perhaps in the stark white moment of this place everything inevitably filled with lament. A patient was raced in on a stretcher, trail of blood droplets counting out steps between the ambulance and the operating room. A janitor strolled through, head down, whistling something tuneless as he wiped up the blood into a red plastic bag and made the floor white again. Lureen said when Bobby was little he wanted to ride the bulls like his daddy or the horsies like his momma, but her Daddy had put the brakes on that. She pulled out the same photo Jack kept in his wallet, red cowboy hats and big-toothed smiles. In the hallways, doctors shouted, nurses scattered, stampede of white uniforms. The fluorescent light convulsed, throwing a cadaverous sheen.

Junior and Francie learned to ride not long after learning to walk, Ennis told her, but Alma wasn't much more keen on it than L.D. Newsome was, and then she got remarried and Bill Munroe sure didn't have horses or know how to ride them. He remembered Alma plucking Junior out of the saddle and dusting off her dress. Riding was for cowboys, not little girls. Like hell it was, Lureen said, though her Daddy thought so too. She talked about the trophies and ribbons she won, childhood summers spent riding horses on her grandparents' ranch and the foreman who taught her all the tricks. Her Daddy had never once gone to see her ride. When she turned sixteen, he sat her down at a desk for the summer instead of in a saddle, gave her pens and books instead of reins. She kept riding, met Jack at the rodeo, won enough riding and racing to almost make her own way. A while later Daddy laid it out clear for her: one or the other. She couldn't complain about having money, but missed the wind in her hair.

"An now he's gone," she said, "an twenty years is gone, an...it kinda makes me wish I'd done it different, y'know?"

Ennis nodded, knowing in fact quite a lot.

"I don't wanna sound ungrateful, but... I dunno, I just kept thinkin: tomorrow, tomorrow. I kept thinkin I'd go to Bobby's _next_ game, I'd take him to the movies _next_ weekend. Kept thinkin I'd call up my sister another day. Kept thinkin I'd spend time with Jack later, cause he wasn't goin anywhere. But I couldn't do any of that right then, cause right then—" she steeled her gaze, said in just the way Ennis imagined old L.D. would've said, "—well, right then there was money to be made." She sneered, and when it faded her face softened again, sharp edges smoothing. "An then it's like I blinked my eyes an here we are."

The double doors sprang open and the doctor zipped through, directing as nurses wheeled a bed down the hallway. She headed into the waiting room, removing her face mask, her expression beneath it practiced and unreadable. Ennis and Lureen sprang up like puppets on a string. "We had a few complications, but he's stabilized now," she told them. "He's not fully conscious, but he's responding to stimuli so that's a good sign. We're just moving him to another room and then you can go in to see him." She flipped through some papers. "Now...which one of you is the next of kin?"

The puppet string tugged Lureen's limp hand into the air and the lights flashed off her wedding ring, leaving its gold sallow.

The doctor handed the papers to her. "If you could just finish filling out the forms—the insurance information and all that. It seems they didn't get completed earlier."

They eased back into their chairs. Lureen wrote in silence for a couple minutes, then muttered a quick word or two just too quietly for Ennis to understand. He glanced at her tidy handwriting as she tapped the pen against the paper, leaving ruts. With the last tap, she hissed through screwed lips, loud enough: "Dammit." Ennis might've asked, but Dottie walked past and Lureen waved her over, her tone uneven. "Excuse me, where's my husband's wallet? He keeps it in his back pocket. Where is it?"

Dottie went to retrieve it, apologized for not thinking of it earlier, and Lureen sat thoughtful and bit at one pink-polished nail until the paint chipped. The nurse returned with a manila envelope. Lureen grabbed out Jack's wallet and scanned over his driver's license, read it again, scrutinizing, her face scrunched up. She pulled out the other cards and shuffled through them: credit cards, bank card, insurance card, club card for the grocery store, business card, library card. Ennis lost himself in thought as he watched these little pieces of Jack's life flit by. Lureen emptied what remained in the wallet onto her lap, unfolded the crumpled up receipts, bank slips, and scrawled-out notes, and looked on the backs of the photos. She dumped the whole mess into the manila envelope then flipped through the cards again, reading the name on each one, her voice quiet but threadbare: Jack C. Twist. Jack Twist. Jonathan C. Twist, Jr. "Dammit," she repeated. In her hand the old family photo trembled, red cowboy hats and rosy cheeks faded from thirteen years in Jack's back pocket. Two tears slipped down onto the hospital forms, tiny splashes. "Shit!" Lureen hissed, "shit," wiping her eyes with a quick finger and soaking up the blotches with her sleeve. Ennis looked up from his distraction.

"I can't remember his middle name. I can't think of my own husband's middle name," Lureen said, staring at the empty space following the "C" on the hospital form. "I used to know it—I know I did. I probably heard it a hundred times. It's the same as his father's name—he told me that. We were talkin one day, before we got married—we were talkin about names an he said he didn't wanna have the same name as his father, he didn't wanna be John C. Twist, Jr. I remember that, so why can't I remember his name? I remember that day nineteen years ago. We were sittin...we were sittin out..." Her words fragmented, her bottom lip quivering in tune with the photo in her hand. "We were... We were..." A few seconds of quiet terminated in a hoarse gasp, drawing it all in at once, then silence again as it sunk to the bottom and festered. And then in a breath the embankment broke, snivels and blubbering, all the restrained and buried things rising to the churning surface and floating. Tears streaked across the photo, leaving paths of vibrant color.

Crocodile tears, Ennis might've scoffed a few hours earlier, like the trickle of a winter creek beneath a foot of ice. But he knew better now.

He'd wanted not to like Lureen, to not give a damn about her goddamn feelings, and hadn't counted on having anything in common with her besides the one thing. But there they sat side by side, Ennis rough and sun-weathered, Lureen like a hard porcelain doll whose paint had begun to chip, both of them having more in common with each other than either one of them had with Jack. More than hard-to-please fathers or a son and daughter the same age or riding horses as kids. He hadn't expected it, but there it was. Toiling on a ranch or at a desk, having pocketfuls of money or none of it, frozen over from years of work or years of fear, it all added up the same: trying to live up to something, and never quite getting it right.

He thought of Jack's wallet and the stack of cards, discrete glimpses of all the mundane things Jack did outside the Wyoming mountains. Ennis realized he knew very little of that life, wasn't a part of it and would never be because he'd said no to Jack all those years ago. The Jack who Ennis knew existed only within the gold ring of campfire light. He rode horses through rivers, pitched tents in the snow, bitched about the cold; he spun wood into fire, drank whiskey like water, and sometimes howled when he made love under the stars. Ennis's Jack climbed into his truck and drove off down dirt roads onto the southbound highway and stopped being Ennis's Jack then and for months after. The rest, Ennis would only ever know as a character in stories told around a campfire. Lureen knew the other Jack, the one who sat at a table and drank coffee from a ceramic cup, who drove his son to school in the morning and sold tractors and combines, went to the grocery store, ran errands, sat on the couch watching television, the Jack who slept in a bed under a roof at night and probably made love more quietly because of that son sleeping down the hall. Two fragments of a life, the highways like thin threads stitching them together. Maybe between the two of them, Jack could almost be complete.

Ennis rested a hand temperately on her heaving back. Finding warmth, he slowly pulled her against his shoulder. He couldn't remember either what that C stood for but couldn't even claim he'd known since maybe that first summer. All the little daily things Ennis had turned away his chance to be a part of; Lureen had known them once but lost them beneath business contracts and receipts. And that was the thing that flowed between them, Lureen's tears soaking into the blood on Ennis's shirt, Ennis allowing a few of his own to slide down into her bleached tufts of hair; each of them loving Jack in their own flawed way yet neither one of them wholly able to give him what he yearned for.


End file.
